Spider's Web
by MacBedh
Summary: The Tok'ra want Jack's help for a mission to a proscribed planet, but a mysterious summons has called the team to a different world. What's the connection? Who's pulling the strings at the center of the web? Gen, late second season, teamy goodness.
1. One

_**Spider's Web**_

_**Prologue**_

- x -

Colonel Jack O'Neill, US Air Force, retired and un-retired – and, yeah, retired again, recalled again, not-really-retired-and-un-retired-anyway, stumped up the stairs to the observation deck of his house in Colorado Springs. His knees protested at the climb, crunching and crackling with every step of the two-plus flights. It was still chilly once the sun had set, especially on a clear spring night like this one. There could be frost on the lawn by morning even in April.

Maybe he was getting old. He felt old after days like this, days when he'd had nothing better to do than sit at a desk and plow through paperwork. But the view never got old. The house was in the Broadmoor Hills area, as close to the western edge of C-Springs as he'd been able to get, and a handy ridge blocked most of the light pollution from the airport, the buildings downtown and the freeway. At six thousand feet above sea level, the stars in the night sky didn't twinkle: they burned, steady and focused, hard white with a steel-blue tinge, like the glint of a knife.

Most people never knew what it was like. Most people lived at sea level, or in cities where the endless wash of glaring electric light stained the skies and hid all but the brightest stars. Most people spent their evenings watching TV, spent their nights sleeping, spent their lives looking down or forward or anywhere but up.

There was a lot that 'most people' never thought about, never knew about, the lucky bastards.

Jack stood for a long moment, beer in hand, just looking at the sky, not bothering to uncover the telescope. He had unpacked it and brought it back out from its winter storage in the attic only a few days ago. It hadn't gotten much use these last couple of years, although he still kept it set up during the warmer months.

There had been a time when he'd been up here late every clear night, when he'd simply covered the telescope and left it up here, night after night, sleeping half the daytime, returning to his watchpost at sunset. Even the winter didn't stop him – any night that the sky was clear, he'd shove the accumulated snow off the deck, unwrap the telescope, and huddle up here in the freezing cold. On a clear January night with no clouds to hold the heat in, the temperature could plunge to below zero in the interminable hours between midnight and pre-dawn, and the sky would seem so clear and silent that he could almost hear the crackling of the stars as they burned holes in his searching eyes. He hadn't been too clear on what he was watching for, but vigilance was the only way to deal with the secret certain knowledge of the lurking menace out there. Even pointless vigilance was better than blind ignorance.

He'd been fresh back from Abydos then, and the glacial nights were a relief after the burning sands, the waves of heat that had shimmered under the hot alien sun. He'd come back with a bad sunburn and a worse secret, and capped a career of officially sanctioned deceit by lying like a rug all the way out the door. It had felt good, after years of lying for his superiors, to lie to them instead. No, scratch that. It had felt _great_.

Returning to an empty home, he'd bought the telescope and settled down to spend the rest of his life, long or short, in useless surveillance. He'd scanned the skies for hours on end, watching for an invasion he wouldn't be able to prepare for or fight, not till the foe hit dirt and came for him on the ground. By then – with no wife or kid to look after and protect, he had no idea what he'd do, any more than he knew what he was looking for in the icy night sky. He'd kept looking anyway.

In the end, he'd gotten his chance to look a hell of a lot harder, a hell of a lot closer. He'd gotten a nice close look at the stars, and at the enemy. They'd all gotten a close look – way too close – the previous summer, when the enemy had tried to pull off that invasion, and had ended up leaving a couple of nice bright short-term stars in the night sky. Jack hadn't been watching any of it through his telescope. He'd been a bit busy.

He finished his beer and decided to leave the telescope under its cover for another night. He had an early briefing the next morning: another busy day, another chance for a close-up look at the stars.

- x -

- x -

_**One**_

_Immediately on arrival on a new planet, special attention must be paid to the architectural details of the Gate environs, both structural and landscape. This will provide your first insight into the level of native culture: given the importance of the Stargate to virtually every offworld society, the immediate area will inevitably reflect the society, its culture and religion, its artistic and technological achievements._

_Always maintain your focus during the first few minutes after embarkation. Depending on the nature of the mission and of the native culture, this may be your only opportunity to make this assessment. Be ready to make your initial observations quickly, in case you're required to leave the Gate area suddenly._

– _D. Jackson, Ph.D., __Essential Guidelines for Archeological and Anthropological Staff on SGC Missions__ (distribution restricted)_

- x -

Under the full midday glare of an alien sun, the inactive Stargate cast a short, stubby shadow. Did it cast a different shadow when it activated – when the shining cascade of impossible badass physics fountained out from the ring, opening a door that shouldn't exist? Did the 'kawoosh' cast a shadow itself? Jack had never noticed, but he was usually thinking of something else, like getting his team home in one piece. Well, four pieces.

He wasn't going to have time to notice this time either, assuming they managed to get that far.

Say what you like about this world, at least the natives had shown a little imagination when it came to the Stargate. They hadn't built a fancy temple around it, or stuck big-assed rocks or ugly statues in front or anything like that. No, they'd built a great big amphitheatre thing like a giant ring of arches, with the damned Gate built right _into_ it, facing the central plaza, a wide flat empty space with no cover at all. At least your typical alien temple setup had something to hide behind, spots where you could lay covering fire, a starting point for tactics.

But here, zilch. There was the DHD, bang in the middle of the arena, casting a little stubby shadow of its own, maybe thirty yards away. Might as well be a mile. There were a dozen Jaffa guarding the DHD in a standard formation, flanking it from all sides with a few guards blocking access to the Gate itself. They wore a new style of armor he'd never seen before: the helmets sported some kind of bird beaks, but these Jaffa weren't Horus guards. They were pretty standard-issue for Jaffa, big and tough and alert, looking around the arena, keeping a sharp eye out for the early worm. And here was Jack, outside the arena looking in, doing his damnedest not to get wormy.

A heavy thump beside him, but Jack didn't look up. Daniel was gasping from the hard run, and the faint occasional wheezing note behind the sound was unique and instantly recognizable.

"Glad you could make it, Daniel," Jack drawled. "I was beginning to think you were gonna miss the party."

Instead of replying, Daniel studied the guarded DHD. "So this whole thing really _was_ a trap. This world isn't free of the Goa'uld at all."

"Nope." Jack peered through his sights at one of the Jaffa for a moment, then lowered his MP-5. "Good call back there at the village market. What spooked you?"

"Um, I was talking to an old man at one of the booths, and, um," Daniel reddened. "He pointed at Sam, and said she had a really nice – well, he used the Goa'uld word for a portion of her anatomy."

"Sweet." Jack looked at him. "That's it?"

"Not quite. I asked him where he'd learned that word, and he winked and rubbed his nose."

"And that's when you hit the panic button."

"Yes." Daniel had drawn his Beretta and was studying it. "Jack, I don't suppose you've got an extra ammo clip for this?"

Jack stared at him, then pulled out a spare magazine and handed it over. "Are you telling me you didn't – "

"Yes, I _did_ have more clips with me. I don't now. And I don't know why not. I think I must've 'bumped into' a pickpocket in the marketplace. It _was_ a bit crowded, if you'll recall."

"Nice of them to leave you the sidearm," Jack remarked. "So tell me, Daniel. What's the Goa'uld word for 'FUBAR'?"

"Um, the Goa'uld written language really doesn't allow for acronyms. It's a syllabary, and you can't form acronyms without an alphabet – "

"_Save it_, Daniel."

Jack turned his attention back to the Jaffa in the arena. He'd have to ask Teal'c which snakehead they belonged to, if he got a chance to, later on. Right now, he had to think about tactics.

Jaffa could be funny about tactics. Bra'tac was damned good at it, when he wasn't riding his mighty-warrior horse, and Teal'c was pretty good. But most Jaffa had the tactical sophistication of sledgehammers. You couldn't blame them too much, though; they had to take orders from the Goa'uld, and the typical Goa'uld had the tactical sophistication of a falling rock.

A small rock arced in the sky above the DHD, bounced off the inner ring of glyphs and fell rattling to the hard-packed earth of the arena. The Jaffa in the Bird Squad sprang to attention, beaky heads whipping around to spot the source of the disturbance. The closest one to the DHD aimed his staff weapon at the stone as it rolled, and shot it, and hit it. Four of the others turned to watch him, but the rest of the troop were still paying attention to their surroundings, damn their invisible eyes.

That was it: you could_ not _actually count on Jaffa to screw up. It's not like they were Stormtroopers. _Never underestimate the enemy, O'Neill_ – but it was a start. Teal'c got two of the distracted ones with two staff blasts, then ducked the answering fire. He was behind the arches off to one side of the arena, at eight o'clock, or half-past eight if you wanted to get exact. Carter was at seventeen minutes to two, give or take, and she got clean hits on three more Birds while they were mostly focused on Teal'c.

_And while you're at it,_ _don't overestimate them either_. That could leave you with your pants down around your knees instead of your ankles. _Every kind of stupid gets you dead._

Time for the Jack-in-the-box routine now. Jumping out from hiding and running towards the DHD – Jack and Daniel had been lying in wait at the point where he figured the Jaffa would be least likely to expect an approach: right in back of the Gate itself.

Plunging through the ring of the inactive Stargate onto the arena grounds – two goons on the Bird Squad spinning around at the movement from the unexpected quarter, raising their staff weapons to fire. _Not Stormtroopers. _Jack jinked from side to side as he ran, managing not to get hit, running hard, and he could see at least two of the Bird Squad that he thought were down were pulling themselves back up again. _Shit_. _Every kind of stupid gets you dead._ That was the rattling cadence as his boots thumped on the drumhead of the dirt, the rhythm of retreat, _everykindastupid getsyoudead._

Bird Number Six had a clear shot, but went down from another blast from Teal'c's staff weapon. Jack snapped off short bursts as he went and let instinct compensate for the up-and-down of the full run. A lucky shot winged Bird Number Seven, a better one put Number Four out again, and a really sweet hit from Carter took down Number Eight.

Daniel was at the DHD now, starting to dial, and Bird Number Seven was half-up again and drawing a bead on Teal'c – but there was a false note, something that clawed at Jack's instincts even before Number Seven twisted and aimed at Daniel instead. Jack shot first. _Wrongo, birdbrain. I don't fool that easy._

Now Bird Number Two had staggered to his feet again and was drawing a bead on him – e_very kind of stupid gets you dead _– and Jack slammed himself to a full stop to get a clean aim and take out the goon and get it right this time. _Crap_, Daniel had stopped dialing and what the hell was he doing with his Beretta? A shot from Daniel's pistol cracked right past Jack's head – okay, not really all _that_ close – Bird Number Eleven had gotten behind Jack. _Forgot to watch the birdie, Jack._ Eleven was down now and Daniel was dialing again and the arena was suddenly quiet except for the chunk of the chevrons as they made the connection to Earth and safety. No more birds shooting. Jack wasn't sure who'd gotten Nine, Ten and Twelve – Teal'c, probably – but he was panting too hard to worry about the score.

The Gate kawooshed and opened, and Jack forgot again to check for a shadow. He was too busy getting his team home.

- x -

Every new recruit to the SGC had their Cathedral Moment.

It had nothing to do with any of the off-world temples that were often built around Stargates on other planets, although some of those were pretty amazing. It didn't happen offworld at all. The Cathedral Moment happened in the Gateroom at Stargate Command, 28 floors down under Cheyenne Mountain. The old hands who knew what was going on would try to arrange to be in the observation room for it, so they could watch, and remember how theirs had felt.

It happened when a new recruit to the SG teams, or a specialist brought in from outside the program, faced the active Gate for the first time: not the crashing fountain of lethal energy, but the dimpled, shifting, glimmering blue surface of the puddle, the actual event horizon that was one long stride away from stepping out onto the surface of a different planet. The Cathedral Moment usually hit when the newbie suddenly realized just how real that billion-mile stride was. It didn't matter how detailed the briefings had been. It hit everyone.

Well, almost everyone. There had been that one nuclear reactor specialist, on loan from the Navy sub program, who had gone white as a sheet at the sight of the glowing blue watery surface and backed away muttering about Cherenkov radiation. Carter had gone into a huddle with him, reciting soothing charms in the esoteric language of physicists, but he'd still looked worried right up till the moment he stepped through. Then the shiny Christmas-morning glow had hit his face, too.

It was different when you faced the puddle on the way home, especially when you were coming in hot. When a mission went south, when the Gate was the only way home to safety, a blue plunge taking you back to a place where people might try to kill you for your parking space, but nobody actually wanted to use your body as a breeding ground for alien parasites, or kill your soul and recycle your carcass – that made you look at the blue glimmer differently. Even more if you had made it into space and seen the blueness of Earth from orbit. One long look at all that water, one long thought about how rare and important water and life and bright blue planets could be, and the shimmer of the active Gate looked just a little bit different the next time, and every time after that.

This time, like every time, the Gateroom was a drab gray concrete box, full of the usual ranks of dour-faced SFs pointing deadly weapons at the returning personnel. Hours of dull routine faced them now: safety protocols to keep out alien nasties, medical exams to test for alien nasties, reports to write and debriefings that never managed to be brief, and all for a screwed-up mission and a wasted trip. Jack counted his surviving team. Four, including himself. So, not so bad. The concrete walls of the Gateroom looked pretty good, viewed from an upright position with no casualties to sour the outlook.

Later in the day, a lot later, Daniel found out that the trip hadn't been a waste after all.

- x -

"It's a memory stick," Daniel explained. He was turning it over in his hands: a thin flat slip of pale wood, shorter than a standard pencil, about the width of a standard comb. It had an ordinary feel to it, undecorated, well-worn and much handled. The symbols on it were shallow grooves, clumsy scrawls, but still familiar, as familiar as the alphabet by now.

Jack reached over with a long arm and filched the stick out of Daniel's grasp. "You are _not_ telling me that they had wooden computers on that planet." He studied the stick for a moment, twiddling it between his fingers.

"I didn't mean _that_ kind of memory stick – " Daniel tried to retrieve it. Jack easily kept it out of his reach, but overlooked Teal'c, who was sitting on the other side of Jack at the briefing room table. Teal'c calmly extracted the stick from Jack's hand while Jack was smirking at Daniel.

"Hey!"

Teal'c studied the stick in turn, one eyebrow furrowed slightly. In his palm, it seemed tiny and fragile. "I have seen these before. They are used to carry messages, or make notes."

"Kind of like Post-Its?" Sam held out a hand in request, and Teal'c handed it to her without demur.

"What is a pohstit?"

"Little bits of paper. With glue," Jack said.

"Like the one Jack uses because he can't remember his computer password," Daniel added.

"You refer to the small square of yellow paper underneath O'Neill's keyboard?"

"That's the one."

"Don't look at me like that," Jack grumbled. "I was doin' fine till they made us change the passwords again. The geeks were complaining about security."

"There was a security issue because too many people write down their passwords on Post-It notes, sir." Sam didn't point out that Jack never had any trouble remembering the computer codes that controlled the critical functions of the base. Especially not the code that shut off the self-destruct.

"I see," Teal'c said serenely. "Yes, the message sticks are very much the same, except a person can use the same one many times."

"I thought so," Daniel murmured. Sam handed him the stick without being asked. "It's soft wood, right? You soak the stick in water, and it swells up and erases what you've written. Then you can press a new message into the wood with a stylus."

"Good thing you found the damned thing before laundry day, Daniel," Jack remarked. He picked the stick out of Daniel's hand again, but this time, he set it in the middle of the table where they could all see it clearly. The symbols in the wood were easy to read: a set of six glyphs that Sam had already checked against the master database of Gate addresses. The combination was unique.

A new Stargate address.

"Would be nice if we actually knew where it came from," Jack drawled. "And how it got into Daniel's pocket."

"Daniel said a lot of things were missing after the mission," Sam said. "Not just his spare ammo clips – a couple of pens, all the chocolate bars, his pocket recorder, a notepad – "

"_With_ my notes," Daniel put in testily. "I had to reproduce it all from memory, and I _know_ I didn't get it all."

"And I got hit too," Sam added. "I mean, there was stuff missing from my pockets as well. Not as much as Daniel, but – "

"Waitaminnit!" Jack interrupted. "_You_ got your pockets picked too, Carter?"

"Yes, sir. It was in my report."

"He didn't read the reports," Daniel muttered to Teal'c. Teal'c inclined his head almost imperceptibly in agreement.

"C'mon, Carter. I can believe it happening to _Daniel_, but come _on _– "

Daniel waved his hands to retrieve their attention. "Hang on a moment, everyone. You can believe this or not, but it's not really that easy to pick my pocket in the first place. I've spent a _lot_ of time in the souks. We're talking _years_. I'm not saying that it can't be done – it's just that it's not _easy_. Whoever did it had to be good."

Sam looked from Jack to Teal'c. "Did either of you lose anything?"

Jack shrugged, somehow indicating a negative. Teal'c tilted his head minutely. "I did not."

"What about the old man?" Jack asked. "The one who tipped you off about the Goa'uld? Could he have done it?"

"Well, he got close enough to _me_, but what about Sam?"

"That's not the point." Jack picked up the slip of wood with its row of symbols, turned it over and over again in long fingers. "Point is, anyone who was close enough to take stuff out was close enough to leave something behind."

They were all watching the door, waiting for General Hammond to arrive; watching it without actually watching, except for Daniel, who didn't mind being obvious. The General arrived, looking mildly surprised to find his entire flagship team already assembled and waiting. Hammond glanced at Daniel, who looked as if he was bracing for an argument while still hoping he wouldn't need one.

"No need to look so anxious, Doctor Jackson. I have reviewed your recommendations and made my decision. If we're able to successfully dial your mystery address, we will send a MALP and see what's on the other side."

Daniel and Sam both relaxed and beamed. Daniel attempted to speak, but Hammond wasn't finished.

"However, that will have to wait. At the moment, your presence is required in the Gateroom."

"All of us?" "What for?" "What's up, sir?" From Teal'c, an inquiring silence.

"We've just received a transmission from the Tok'ra." He caught Sam's eye and nodded. "Yes, it's your father, Captain Carter."

Sam looked startled, pleased and perplexed at once. "What did he say? Is he coming here? Himself?"

Jack glowered. " 'Bout time. He never writes, never sends flowers, no cards, not even an email . . . " he subsided at a look from Hammond. Sam looked uncomfortable at the outburst – anyone else might have been squirming. Daniel narrowed his eyes, studying first Jack's face, then the General's. Teal'c's expression didn't change, but his impassivity shifted.

"The message said that he's coming here in person."

Jack got up to follow his team out of the briefing room, but a gesture from Hammond stopped him. "A word with you, Colonel." He glanced at Sam's retreating form and lowered his voice. "I have no idea why Jacob Carter is on his way here, but he asked for you personally, Jack."

"Me? Not Carter? Why?"

"I wish I knew," Hammond said. "But it could be an opportunity for us. When General Carter left this planet to become a Tok'ra host – "

"A snake by any other name," Jack muttered.

" – it was expected, once his improved health permitted, that he would take up duties as our liaison with the Tok'ra – "

"And the first time we rang them up, he didn't even answer," Jack said. "The snake they _did_ send flat-out _ordered_ us to surrender a prisoner to an enemy for death by torture. He couldn't even understand why we'd give a dying man painkillers. He also called us – what was it? – 'fools' and 'weak'. Also primitive, overconfident, and in over our heads. Did I miss anything there, Daniel?"

"I think you pretty much covered it," Daniel's voice drifted in from behind Jack.

"Indeed."

"Doctor Jackson, Teal'c, I don't recall inviting you to stay for this discussion," Hammond said with deceptive mildness.

Daniel emerged the rest of the way from just out of sight on the far side of the doorway. Behind him, Teal'c loomed in eloquent silence.

"And all of that came from a Tok'ra who supposedly _likes_ us," Jack said. "Which kinda makes me wonder what the others say about us, especially when General Carter isn't around to put in a good word. _We_ offered to share information, and _they_ withheld intel. They do that a lot, in case you haven't noticed."

"Yes, Colonel, I had noted that." Hammond said drily. "Jacob Carter's presence amongst the Tok'ra has led to better relations, but – "

"We've seen him exactly once," Jack interrupted again. "And it was like pulling teeth to get any more out of him than the absolute minimum information we needed to keep from getting killed."

Behind him, Daniel broke in. "Jack, are you really being fair about that? I got the impression that they were giving us as much information as they were allowed to. Jacob – and Selmak – did come when we asked for their help, and provided us with that specialized weapon – so we've finally scored some actual advanced technology, which I thought was number one on the military's list of priorities. He filled us in on the Reetou and their hit teams – "

"He waited until we'd already been _infiltrated by hostiles_, and were in an _imminent combat situation_, before he got around to coughing up full information on the threat potential, armament and tactics of an confirmed enemy," Jack snapped. "For somebody who ought to know the importance of decent intel, he was pretty damned close-mouthed. Sir – " Jack looked back to where Hammond stood " – I know you've been buddies for a long time. I know General Carter spent more of his career flying a desk, and not so much commanding front-line units. But if I had anyone under _my_ command with that habit of withholding mission-critical tactical information, and dribbling out selective bits according to a private agenda, I'd – "

"You'd be looking in a mirror," said Daniel.

Hammond gave him a look that should have been severe, but wasn't.

"At least I know the guy in the mirror," Jack said. "I know who calls the shots there."

"What about the fancy guns? The TERs?" said Daniel. "Doesn't that count for something? It's the only piece of really advanced gear the Tok'ra have shared with us."

"Precisely," murmured Teal'c. "They have given us nothing else."

"Captain Carter has informed me that the TER can't be reverse engineered," said Hammond before Jack could launch into another tirade. "When she attempted to dismantle one of the units and analyze the underlying technology, it turned into a puddle of slag. She believes that this is a deliberate aspect of the design, intended to prevent us from using the weapons for any purpose other than defense against the Reetou. I've given orders that no further attempts will be made, so as not to deplete the limited stock we have. Based on their history so far, we can't assume the Tok'ra will give us any more, despite their assurances."

Daniel frowned at Jack. "You sure this isn't really about the Reetou kid? I know, they haven't sent any word about how he's doing since the Tok'ra took him away, but maybe Jacob's got some good news there – no news might be good news – " he subsided quickly at the look on Jack's face.

Hammond cleared his throat in the awkward silence. "Let's just say the Joint Chiefs would be very pleased to see a little more tangible advantage from our relations with the Tok'ra. They'll be hoping General Carter's visit produces better results than the last one did."

"At least he's off the sick list for good," Jack said brightly. "Saves the taxpayers a little cash on his medical bills."

- x -

Sam Carter studied her father surreptitiously during the short walk from the Gateroom to the briefing room. General Jacob Carter looked fit and healthy, lively and energetic, and walked with a light step and a graceful economy of movement that was just a little different from the way he'd been before. Before blending . . . before half his dying body had been given over to a tandem driver. Before the symbiote Selmak had saved and shifted his life. There was no trace of the cancer now, no sign of sickness in his face: his eyes were bright and alert, his wasted cheeks had filled out. In fact, he looked almost disgustingly healthy.

He was wearing Tok'ra clothing again, or still. It looked strange on him to Sam, although the strangest thing was simply seeing him out of uniform. For all she knew, she might never see him in uniform again. She faced that thought even as it gave her insides a harsh wrench, almost as bad as the earliest trips through the Stargate.

Sam wasn't really sure what her father's status was in the Air Force right now, which was absurd. She should have taken the time to find out. He hadn't been declared dead – she did know that much – maybe he had been medically retired, or placed on extended leave. If so, it could break all the records ever for extended leave: extended for a century or two, extended right across the galaxy, extended into a war vaster in scope than anything the US military had ever been forced to contemplate before.

"Dad, you haven't said why you're here," she said as they found their chairs in the briefing room. The others had lagged slightly, giving her a few moments of almost-privacy with her father. She'd tried twice already to get something out of him, but he'd brushed her off. Now he smiled breezily.

"Isn't it enough for me to want to visit my favorite daughter?"

Sam smiled brightly. "Bull."

Jacob Carter gave her an exaggerated scowl, although his eyes were twinkling. Then the shift happened: a faint glow entered the eyes, and his voice became throaty as Selmak spoke. "Four thousand years have passed on the Tau'ri world, and yet children are still disrespectful of their elders."

"And after four thousand years, the elders are still fibbing to their kids," Sam said. "C'mon, Dad. Next you'll be telling me that Santa Claus is a Tok'ra."

Daniel, Jack, Teal'c and General Hammond had run out of plausible reasons to hang back, and were taking their places around the table. Teal'c had that look on his face, the one that meant that he didn't have a clue about the cultural reference, but was filing it away somewhere for future consideration while he analyzed the personal interplay, and probably made private side bets on who would win a given round of sparring. Jack looked long-suffering. Daniel was looking at his coffee cup as he refilled it from the pot in the briefing room.

"Good to see you back here, Jacob," Hammond said warmly.

Beside him, Jack murmured, "Even better if Tok'ra Claus is finally gonna bring us prezzies. I shoulda hung up my socks in the Gateroom last night." He leaned across the table towards Jacob. "Hey, General. Speaking of good little boys and girls. How's Charlie doing?"

"Charlie?"

Jack bared his teeth, but he wasn't smiling. "Yeah. _Charlie_. The Reetou kid? Two weeks ago? You took him out of here to give him one of your Tok'ra . . . " He made a vigorous gesture with several waggling fingers in the general direction of his head. "You know. It was the only thing that could fix him up. Save his life."

Jacob – the glow had faded and Sam knew it was her father – glanced away, avoiding Jack's eyes. For a dreadful moment, Sam thought that Selmak was about to butt in. All Jacob said was, "I'm sorry, Jack. He didn't make it."

Sam looked quickly from her father's face to Jack's, in time to see – nothing. No reaction at all; the Colonel's face went blank, a deadly vacancy that made her stomach curdle. Across the table, Daniel winced and looked anxiously at Jack. Jack didn't look back at him, didn't look at anything.

In the awkward silence that followed, Jacob stood up and laid his hands flat on the table. Sam had seen that gesture a million times if she'd seen it once. It was supposed to mean that he was laying everything out. That was never the case, of course; he always had something in reserve. A good general always did.

"George, everyone, my apologies for the lack of notice and thanks for the open door. I'm not actually here on a social call. I've got a proposition for you – specifically, for Colonel O'Neill."

Jack glowered, the first sign of life he'd shown since the bad news, and Sam found herself breathing again. "Just for the record, General, you're really not my type."

Jacob's face mirrored the long-suffering expression Jack had been wearing earlier. He cleared his throat and went on. "We recently got a piece of valuable intel from one of our operatives . . . that is, from a Tok'ra operative who's spent the last several months establishing himself at the court of one of the lesser System Lords, Khnum."

"Khnum?" Daniel interrupted. "According to some sources, Khnum was supposed to have been – " he glanced at Jack and Teal'c and winced. " – the son of Sokar. And, um, Hathor."

Jack made a disgusted face. Jacob nodded.

"That's right, Dr. Jackson. The Goa'uld Khnum isn't the actual offspring of both Goa'uld, since the System Lords won't stand for anything like that. But he's been in the service of Sokar for millennia. Went into exile with him when Sokar disappeared, then came back out again a year ago. He's up to his eyebrows in Sokar's schemes to return to power."

Jack looked slightly less nauseated. "So we're not actually dealing with Mommie Dearest here?"

"You mean Hathor?" Jacob shook his head. "No, no, nothing like that."

Hammond was leaning forward, his face creased with concern. "This is the first we've heard of any possible alliance between Sokar and Hathor. It's bad enough that she escaped us last year, and if she's teaming up with Sokar now – "

"She isn't," Jacob interrupted.

"You're sure of that?"

"Positive. To be honest, we're still trying to find out what she's up to these days – there's been no solid information on her movements since her attempt to establish a base here – "

"Would you actually tell us if there was?" Jack broke in.

He got a scowl in reply. "Look, _Colonel_. From the point of view of the rest of the galaxy, your people woke her up, let her out of prison, gave her access to a Stargate and let her get away. You're not in the greatest position to demand information on what she's done since then – "

Jack was gripping the arms of his chair; he looked ready to launch himself across the conference table. General Hammond's voice cut in.

"_Jacob_. I believe we were discussing the current Goa'uld political situation, am I correct?"

Jack settled back into the leather chair seat, seething visibly. Jacob Carter deliberately turned away from Jack and faced Hammond. A flicker of light touched his eyes – Sam was sure of it – and his shoulders visibly relaxed. _Huh. Does Selmak get to smack his arm and tell him to back off when he's being overbearing? God, that would be nice._

When Jacob began to speak again, it was his own voice, but relatively even and calm. "Not exactly – although, yes, I do understand that an alliance between Hathor and Sokar sounds like a nightmare. Hell, it would _be_ a nightmare. But it won't happen. Back a few thousand years ago, Hathor played off Ra and Sokar against each other, and they both got tired of her in the end. That's how she ended up imprisoned in stasis. Every System Lord has to have a Queen on tap, but she was just too dangerous." Jacob glanced at Daniel with an unreadable expression.

Daniel answered with a brittle smile. "So if there's a System Lord named Khnum, what about Ptah?"

"Now you're pulling my leg," Jack said. "Ptooie? There's an Egyptian god named 'Ptooie'?

"Not Ptooie, _Ptah_ – "

"Would you two cut it out?" Jacob demanded. "Yes, there's a Lord Ptah, or there used to be. He was a hanger-on in Sokar's court. Nobody seems to know what's happened to him – he dropped out of sight a few centuries ago. He probably pissed Sokar off. That happens a lot, and it's not pretty."

"I'll bet," said Jack. He glanced at Teal'c, and got an eyebrow twitch in agreement.

Hammond held up a hand. "What about your operative?"

"Yeah. Anyway, the operative got access to part of Khnum's records. He was looking for information on Sokar's current forces, but he turned up something else, something the Tok'ra have been wanting to find for a couple of centuries." He looked around the table. Sam caught the gleam in his eyes – not Selmak peeking out; it was definitely her father. He was genuinely excited about his news.

"He found the coordinates of a planet that Sokar used to control. It was abandoned about two hundred years ago. The address of the Stargate was wiped out of the Goa'uld records, and return by ship was forbidden."

"Why?" Daniel asked.

"Plague."

Jack's eyebrows levitated. "Plague? As in, cough cough die?"

"Pretty much." Jacob looked around the table again. "We never found out exactly what the disease was or what caused it, but it's the only pathogen ever known to have killed Goa'uld symbiotes. Ordinary humans were immune, but human hosts died as well – both Jaffa and full Goa'uld hosts. The symbiotes couldn't cure the plague."

"So the System Lords cut and ran and tore the address out of their galactic Rolodex," Jack said. "Sounds like them."

"I have never heard of this." Teal'c was frowning. "The symbiotes should have been immune to every disease."

"That's just it," said Jacob. "They weren't. But you're right. They should have been. The dead didn't even respond to sarcophagus treatment." Teal'c's eyebrow canted sharply at that. "There was a human slave colony on the planet – the Goa'uld abandoned them when they withdrew. We don't know if there are any survivors."

"Won't the people have Gated out once the Goa'uld left?" Sam asked.

"It's believed that the Goa'uld sabotaged the DHD on the planet, so that nobody could leave once they'd retreated. They didn't want to risk any possibility that the contagion would spread to other worlds."

Daniel's face was set in an outraged rictus. "So they just left them all to die of an untreatable fatal disease? Just like that?"

"They're more likely to have starved to death," Jacob said bluntly. "The planet was a mining colony. It was never intended to sustain itself without outside supplies. You see, the System Lords don't want any of their slave worlds to be really capable of independence. It makes them nervous if any colony can get along by itself. Especially not if the planet has real strategic value."

"Do the Tok'ra know what was being mined there?" Hammond asked. At the question, Sam saw Jack's eyes flick quickly to her father's face. Looking for signs of withheld information. She didn't see any sign of it herself, but she wished she didn't have to look for it.

Jacob was shaking his head, and he looked sincere, anyway. "We don't know. We're pretty sure it wasn't naquadah, but we know it was important. Sokar originally conquered the planet after a different Goa'uld had established the colony, and he fought at least three territorial wars to keep it. When he was told the place had to be abandoned, he flew into a rage."

"The rages of Sokar are legendary," Teal'c remarked.

"Yeah, no kidding. I'll tell you what else is legendary: the guy loves keeping things close to the chest. The location of the planet was a carefully guarded secret even before the plague. It was a real stroke of luck for us – our operative actually found the records of the orders to abandon the planet, and got the address. We worked out the physical coordinates from that." He took a deep breath. "We're not after the minerals, whatever's there. We're hoping to get some clue to the plague itself."

"You think you might be able to use it against the Goa'uld," said Sam.

"You're talking about germ warfare," said Daniel. He glanced across the table at Jack. Jack was looking disgusted again, but there was a steely, determined look in his eyes. Daniel returned his gaze to his coffee cup.

Sam's eyebrows were furrowed. "Dad, if there was a plague that kills Goa'uld symbiotes, that planet isn't safe for the Tok'ra either. Do you know _anything_ about the vectors? How can you be sure the disease is dormant or gone?"

"That's the thing," said Jacob. "We need help from someone who isn't a Tok'ra. That's where Jack comes in."

"Waitaminute!" Jack sat up straight, suddenly seeming very tall even though he was still sitting down. "Why me?"

The more her father sparred with Jack, the more his face reminded Sam of weather patterns on a very stormy day. Just now, there was a fresh thunderstorm brewing. As a general, he hadn't had to deal much with insubordination; she hoped that was it, and not another round of the immortal Tok'ra elders regarding the lowly humans of Earth.

"You're the best fit for the mission," Jacob was saying. For the moment, the developing thunderclouds were still a ways off. "You've got the right kind of background and training, and you're familiar with offworld operations."

"Dad, how are you going to get there?" Sam asked suddenly. "You said the Stargate is disabled. And you couldn't Gate through safely anyway – or maybe you could, but the only way to find out would be to step through and – "

" – and wait to find out how fast I die of plague, yes, we figured all that out by ourselves. We'll go by ship."

"So the Tok'ra _do_ have ships?" Daniel suddenly said. "That's nice to know. We didn't, you see."

The thundercloud look darkened on Jacob's face. He'd been looking away from Daniel for most of this time, facing the end of the table where Jack and General Hammond were sitting, the end where he expected the flak to come from. "Yes, we've got ships. We have to get around the galaxy somehow, preferably without being seen and followed." Not a thunderstorm after all, Sam thought. Acid rain. "The Stargates on many Goa'uld worlds are heavily guarded or at least constantly monitored," Jacob said. "It's like that on a lot of the planets we most need to visit, the worlds under key System Lord control. We _are_ fighting a war, in case it's slipped your mind."

"We? You mean the Tok'ra? Or does Earth get to have anything to do with all this? You do remember Earth, I assume. That's the planet where you were born . . . in case it's slipped your mind."

Jacob stared at Daniel for a long moment before he spoke again. "George, are they always this bad?"

Hammond looked disingenuous. "Usually they're worse."

- x - x -_  
_


	2. Two

_**Spider's Web**_

_**Two**_

- x -

_Although every transplanted offworld population has inevitably suffered a greater or lesser degree of cultural contamination from Goa'uld culture, your assessment of the underlying root culture can be a determining factor in the ultimate success or failure of the mission. Clues to cultural priorities and taboos must be identified at the earliest possible opportunity._

_The better your initial position is at the onset of an actual offworld encounter, the more likely you are to be able to interact with the transplanted population for a long enough period to actually learn something._

– _D. Jackson, Ph.D., __Essential Guidelines for Archeological and Anthropological Staff on SGC Missions__ (distribution restricted)_

- x -

"Receiving MALP telemetry now," the technician announced. Sam looked up from her own keyboard. Daniel, sitting next to the tech, adjusted his headset and positioned the mike. Sam could feel the excitement vibrating off him and hoped he wouldn't be disappointed. The Gate address had resolved successfully on the first try, and if this second round went well, they'd have their mission – unless Colonel O'Neill's absence scuttled the entire plan.

On the monitor in front of them, the screen image resolved to show the video feed from the mobile probe's camera eye. Daniel sat up straighter: the picture showed the same area as before, a broad flat square of pale trodden earth in front of the new world's Stargate, surrounded by a low stone wall. Behind them, different shades and heights of pale feathery green: this world – or, more precisely, this part of this world – was well supplied with trees. The greenery didn't look like the dark heavy conifers they found so often; it must be a warmer climate, probably a good spot in the fertile zone, well able to support settlement and the demands of feeding an agrarian population.

If the Colonel had been here, Sam thought, he'd be saying something sarcastic about it: What A Surprise, It's Another World With Trees. Since he wasn't, she found herself murmuring, "What a surprise. It's another world with trees."

"Indeed," Teal'c murmured, equally softly, from where he stood behind her. She glanced up and met his eyes, enjoying the private exchange.

Daniel hadn't noticed or heard either of them. He was gesturing at the screen, where a cluster of three or four people in bright clothing stood at the edge of the camera's range, talking excitedly. One was pointing to the MALP, although not directly at the camera – he must have seen the light begin to flash when the camera activated.

"Is that Lansana?" Sam asked.

Daniel nodded vigorously. "Yes, yes. He's the one who approached the MALP first after it arrived yesterday – there was quite a crowd. They were all startled when it came out of the Gate, but not really frightened. What we can see of this world may not look high-tech, but Lansana's people are familiar with machinery and technology."

Lansana was a young man, lean and tall, with dark walnut skin and a lively, expressive face. He was dressed in a length of brightly colored cloth that wrapped around his hips and fell to knee-length; the bright yellow sun of P7R-684 played on the bare skin of his chest and shoulders, and gleamed on the silver of the neck ring he wore. He nudged the woman next to him and gestured, and she darted away through the crowd as if in search of something, while he walked across the square towards the camera.

"Lansana approached the MALP and examined it, and responded when we spoke to him," Daniel said.

"Is he a scientist or something?" asked the technician.

"Um, no. Apparently he's more or less the head shipping clerk of the planet's import-export department."

"Bit of a letdown," said the technician wryly.

Behind them, General Hammond cleared his throat. "I can live with a few letdowns of that type."

Lansana was now looking across the square and beckoning. A moment later, the scene was blocked by the faces of a man and a woman, dark ebony, deeply creased around the eyes. The man had short hair in tight curls, peppered with white; the woman wore a bright colored scarf wrapped around her head. Where Lansana wore a single neck ring, the two elders wore over a dozen each. The thin rows of silver metal sparkled and plinked softly as the faces leaned towards the camera. The eyes were bright and shrewd, and the smiles looked and felt genuine.

Daniel smiled in return, although he knew it was ridiculous – in spite of his suggestion, the SGC still hadn't mounted screens on the MALPs to enable two-way video communication. They'd _have_ to do it eventually, and the sooner the better. He cleared his throat. "Hello. I'm Daniel Jackson. Can you hear me?"

The woman nudged the man. "See? See? I told you Lansana was not lying. The tale was much too fantastic for him to make it up. He doesn't have the imagination for such a story."

The man glowered at her and then turned back to the camera. "Yes, we hear you, Danjel-Djaksohn. But we do not see you. Where are you?"

"I am speaking to you from another world, on the far side of the Stargate."

The man nodded. "You are not speaking to us from Ghaba or Djenne, Danjel-Djaksohn. You are on another world, a different world, is this true?"

"It is. Lansana told me that you use the Stargate yourselves, for travel and trade, but with only one other world. My friends and I would like to visit your world and meet you and your people. Will you allow this?"

The man opened his mouth, but the woman tapped his shoulder briskly. "Wait, old man. Didn't you hear his voice? Danjel-Djaksohn, you have a young man's voice. Does your clan have no elders to speak for them?"

Daniel looked over his shoulder. General Hammond was standing at the back of the observation room, listening to the conversation. He nodded and stepped forward.

Daniel leaned towards the mike. "Ma'am – um, forgive, me, how should I address you?"

"I am Kadijatu, and this is Balla. We are both of the clan Traore, and we both sit upon the Gbara."

"That's probably the ruling council," Daniel murmured. He raised his voice to speak clearly. "Clan Elders of Traore, this is General Hammond, the, um, leader of our clan, Stargate Command. 'General' is his title as our leader."

Hammond leaned over the mike. "How d'you do, ma'am."

- x -

According to Jacob, the little ships – tel'taks – were mostly used by the Jaffa for cargo transport and milk runs. There wasn't much crew space and everything was that clunky Goa'uld gold, like a blocky fungus of bad taste. On the other hand, even a tall man could stand up in the ship and walk around and not bash his head on anything – they probably had to design their ships to leave room for those big honking Jaffa helmets, after all.

On the flight deck, Jacob was sitting in front of something that was either a flight control panel or a really ugly collection of souvenir paperweights. Jack settled into the second chair and studied the weird-assed layout.

He longed to get his hands on the controls – assuming he could get Jacob to tell him what the hell they were and how they worked. He wondered how it would feel to fly the thing, how it would handle. Better not make too much of it, though. The tel'taks might be the spaceship equivalent of wallowing, gas-guzzling pigs.

"Y'know, it would really help if I knew how these things operated. What if something happens to you, and I have to fly us out?"

For a moment, Jacob looked as if he was trying to think of a reason not to agree. Then he nodded. "I'll do my best. You've got to understand, though, from my point of view, I learned to fly these so many centuries ago that it's a bit hard to remember what it was like."

Jack studied the main control, which looked like a giant glass ball rigged up with a lava lamp inside. With all their 'shopping' amongst the peoples of Earth across the centuries, you'd think the Goa'uld had kidnapped demented kitsch designers from the 60's to build their spaceships. Maybe that explained their dress sense, too. Naw. _Nothing_ could explain Goa'uld fashion.

Maybe the tel'taks were the equivalent of a Pontiac Aztek in space. Or a space Yugo. He wondered if he could dust off all those bad Yugo jokes for Selmak's benefit. Carter had said that Selmak was supposed to have a sense of humor, right? _Hey, Selmak. How come there's a rear window defroster in a tel'tak? To warm up your hands when you have to escape from a gravity well._ Okay, forget that.

"So. General Carter – "

"Jack, you better make it Jacob. General Carter . . . General Carter didn't die, but I've kind of left that behind."

"Okay. Jacob."

There was a moment of silence as the cyan and violet lines of hyperspace streamed silently past them. Finally, Jacob asked, "What?"

"Charlie," Jack said deliberately.

"The Reetou kid?"

"Yeah. The Reetou kid. Did you really try?"

A pause, and the throaty voice of Selmak responded. "As Jacob told you, Colonel O'Neill. The boy did not survive. I am sorry."

"Nngyaagh!" Jack held up both index fingers and waggled them. "I was talkin' to Jacob there. Don't you interrupt." Selmak dipped his – _their_ – head slightly, and the glow in the eyes faded out. "Like I was saying, _Jacob_, did you really try? Did you give it everything, try _everything_, like he was your own kid?"

Jack was career military. He'd been lied to by generals for years and knew how it smelled. He was trying hard not to assume that it was happening now.

"Simple enough question, Jacob. Yes or no. _Did you try?_ Did you put a snake – a _symbiote _– in that kid's head to try and save his life?"

Jacob sighed, winced, rubbed his forehead. "Jack . . . you can't begin to realize . . . " The words tumbled out. "The kid was _completely_ messed up physically – my god. _Nothing_ worked. He was a genetic jury-rig – _nothing_ worked right. I'm _sorry_, Jack, _really_. I do have kids of my own, in case you've forgotten that? _Nothing_ could be done."

Jack didn't waver. "So, simple answer, yes. You did try."

"Natar made the attempt." Jacob's voice had dropped to a low murmur. "She's a good friend of Selmak's – she volunteered for it." Jacob looked Jack full in the face, for the first time, and spoke deliberately. "Natar is a healthy Tok'ra symbiote in the prime of life. And, not that _you_ care, but I do and Selmak does – Natar survived. She's still recovering, in a new host."

A long silence followed. Hyperspace flickered and shimmered.

"You could've told us all of that right off."

"Jesus _Christ_, Jack, this is a _war!_ Maybe you've forgotten about 'Need-to-Know? You've got _no_ idea – "

"Don't I?" Jack met Jacob's scowl with a glare of his own. "Are you and the Tok'ra planning on ever helping us get more of an idea?" He added deliberately, "Did you get much intel out of Charlie?"

"_What?_"

"Did your Navarre girl – "

"Na_tar_."

"Was she in Charlie's head long enough for you to learn much about the Reetou? Crap. Even if she did, would you tell us? Y'know, it's only been a few weeks since you started hanging out with the cool kids at the playground, but you've already kind of forgotten how to talk to mom and dad."

Jacob's eyes narrowed. "You really like pushing things, don't you?"

"Ask Hammond about that." Jack's expression didn't waver.

Jacob's eyes crinkled slightly. "Looks like I'll have to." He half shrugged and turned his attention back to the flight controls. "Maybe it would be different if I'd been involved in the Stargate program before – hell, if I'd even _known _about it. But Jack, you don't realize just how much the Tau'ri have been stomping around the galaxy like a bull in a china shop."

'_Tau'ri', huh? _"You mean just like we do on our own planet? You're career military, Jacob. You can't be surprised by that."

Jacob's jaw tightened, but he kept his voice even. "I've been given a very different perspective on all that now."

"Yeah, I bet." Jack leaned back in his flight chair. "About that Tok'ra liaison gig. When are you actually gonna start liaising?"

"_What?_" Jacob took his hands off the red lava-lamp ball and faced Jack squarely. "What the _hell_ is that supposed to mean?"

"Whaddya think it means?" Jack stood up, looming over Jacob. Even in dress blues at a fancy Washington function, it had been uncomfortable when the two stood close together: Jack so much taller, the rows of bright striped ribbons on his uniform covering so much of the broad chest. General Jacob Carter, at the end of his service career, with a sparse handful of chest candy to Jack's overflowing stacks. It didn't mean the general lacked courage or ability, but God knows he hadn't had the same kind of combat history – getting out into the trenches, eating dirt, coming to direct grips with the enemy.

Not until now.

Jacob must have been an unusual recruit for the Tok'ra – a crotchety old fart instead of a young idealist. A seasoned military campaigner, even though he'd known nothing of the Goa'uld. Decades of staff experience and all that Washington political mileage, and underneath it all, an aging man who couldn't actually go to war anymore, who had to fight long-distance, who had to send younger men out to die in his place.

_Every military does it – you sign up the young kids for cannon fodder when they're too young and stupid to know better. Stupid young kids mostly do a better job of following orders, as long as they're trained hard enough to do just that. By the time a soldier really knows how to fight, he's too old for it._

Jack studied Jacob, remembering the man as he'd seen him, briefly, bringing him through the Stargate straight from what was supposed to have been his deathbed – a walking dead man, burning skin that felt paper-thin and tissue-fragile, hollow eyes raging against the dying of the light, too stubborn for resignation or peace, too aware for hope. Jack had been off chasing Tok'ra spies and had missed the 'blending', the symbiote shotgun wedding that had saved both Selmak and Jacob. His next sight of the general had been of a healthy, robust man, suddenly restored to full vitality and still reeling from it.

_Hell_. On Earth, they'd assumed he'd turn into a senior diplomat, sit on the Tok'ra councils and advocate for the good old USA. Right? And the man had just been handed a body in perfect condition, and a crusade to go with it. How could they _ever_ have expected that Jacob Carter would settle down to an interplanetary desk job? Like the Tok'ra even _had_ desk jobs.

The worst part was that Jack would probably like the old coot, if the guy wasn't half snake.

The old coot was still scowling. "This isn't just about the United States, or even about Earth. It's about the whole goddamned _galaxy_."

"Is it?" Jack tried to make the drawled reply as insolent as he could, but suddenly his heart wasn't in it. "Is it about the galaxy, or is it just about the Tok'ra?"

The light flared up in Jacob's eyes – Goa'uld eyes, the glow that meant a crazed monomaniac in a killing rage. Jack braced himself. Jacob tilted his head, as if he was listening to a distant voice that he didn't quite want to hear. Incredibly, the tension went out of his shoulders and hands, and he nodded, turned away from Jack, placed his hands flat on the tel'tak controls and looked out at the flowing tracers of hyperspace. After a few moments, the glow in his eyes flickered out. He spoke in a calm, ordinary voice.

"How the hell does George Hammond put up with you?"

Jack shrugged and sat down again. "It must be my suave charm and winning ways." He sat still for only a few moments. "So. You gonna show me how to fly this thing?"

- x -

Sam had attended more than her share of formal diplomatic functions. As the highly presentable daughter of a widowed Air Force officer rising in the ranks of the Washington brass, she'd started playing hostess and armflower to her father before she'd graduated from high school. That early training in the delicate, mincing politics of social interaction came in handy more often than she liked to admit, especially offworld. But she preferred to leave the heavy negotiating to Daniel. He'd more or less gotten over the tendency to promise the whole candy store, and he had an incredible ability to end up with additional concessions that nobody thought he could get.

Besides, he was fascinating to watch. A tiresome professional diplomat from New Jersey had told her, years ago, that trade negotiations were slightly less thrilling than watching paint dry. He would be astonished if he knew just how lively it could get, especially when the sky wasn't the limit and there were no lawyers to mess things up.

Daniel was on his second session of open-Gate discussions: the natives of '684 knew about the 38-minute time limit on the wormhole, and Kadijatu had graciously allowed Daniel to persuade her to renew the conversation after the first window had timed out. He was still angling for permission for SG-1 to visit the planet, and the talks were circling around some unlikely side paths.

"We're especially interested in any stories you have of how your people freed themselves from the Goa'uld."

"The . . . Gwaoooold?" Kadijatu's forehead wrinkled.

"Yes, the – "

"Ah! You mean the Gwaldé, yes?" Her voice changed very suddenly, became harsh. "The snake demons? Wagadou-Bida and his evil kin?"

"Yes, yes. That's it," Daniel said. "Lansana told me your people are free of them. How did this happen?"

"Oho!" Suddenly Kadijatu was beaming and nodding. "You wish the Great Tale, then? The Song of the Children of Anansi?" She narrowed her eyes. "What tale will you offer us in return?"

"Our people have many fine tales, Elder." Sam watched him scribbling notes. _Bible. Homer. Eddas. Bhagavad-Gita. Shakespeare._

"This Maahlp, you call it. Does it record our words? Will it speak to us and hear us when the Sky-Ring is quiet?"

"Um, we have devices that can do that, but we would need to bring them to you. We would be glad to give you one as a gift, to make it easier for us to share our stories."

He turned to Sam, covering the mike for a moment. "I think I'm getting somewhere," he murmured. "They use the standard written Goa'uld script for keeping physical records, but they seem to have retained a really strong oral history tradition. I'm guessing their ancestors were taken from sub-Saharan Africa, maybe from one of the West African empires."

"Those neck rings they're all wearing – " Sam gestured towards the screen. "How come they aren't all stacked up on their necks?"

"You're thinking of the Ndebele women of South Africa. That's a different practice. I'm pretty sure these are just status markers – the more important an individual is, the more rings they're wearing. In the old empire of Ghana, the rings would've been gold for the nobles and brass or copper for the artisan class – "

"Daniel, Kadijatu's talking to you again."

"Oh. Sorry." He turned back to the mike, and Sam glanced at Teal'c, exchanged a nod, and slipped away to find General Hammond. Teal'c followed her.

"You're sure?" Hammond frowned.

"No, sir. I can't be sure without actually examining the metal of the rings and doing an analysis. But it looks right. And you can see that the metal's very light. Kadijatu's a small woman, and she's wearing a whole bunch of those rings. Teal'c, did you see it too?"

"I did. She does not move her head and body as one who bears a great weight on the shoulders."

"From what Daniel said, they should be using whatever metal they have that's the most valuable. It should've been gold, at least for the really important VIPs. But it's not. Look at the people in the groups behind the elders, in the background. You can see some of the younger ones are wearing gold earrings and other jewelry – as if gold is _less_ precious. Something that the kids wear."

Hammond nodded. "I don't need to tell you how important this could be," he said. "This is the first time since the natives of P7F-492 buried their Gate that we've found a potential source for trinium."

- x -

An hour later, around the briefing room table, Daniel was voluble with excitement, extolling the cultural riches of the planet. General Hammond was listening with attention, or at least putting on a good imitation of it.

"And you're telling me they just want Dr. Jackson to tell them stories?" he asked Sam when Daniel paused for breath.

"Well, I'm sure they'll want more than just that, sir. But it's a start."

"It is a fine start," Teal'c declared. "The Tauri have nearly unlimited wealth in this regard. O'Neill recently made me a gift of one of your great romantic sagas."

"Romeo and Juliet?" asked Sam.

Teal'c gave his head the miniscule tilt that was his equivalent of a decisive negative shake. "Lucy and Ricky." He smiled warmly. "It is a fine tale. Perhaps you can offer them that story, Daniel Jackson."

Hammond swallowed a grin with visible difficulty and looked at Sam instead. "Captain Carter. Have you checked those Gate addresses yet?"

"Yes, sir. The new address – that is, the address for the new planet, designated as P7R-684 – has been checked against the address Dad gave us." She didn't mention the difficulty they'd had in getting Jacob Carter to provide the address. It was the same old 'Tok'ra thing', as Colonel O'Neill would have said – but it was infuriating, after all these years, still getting the runaround from her father. "Dad and Colonel O'Neill are en route to a planet we've designated as P7F-492. The two planets are in the same general area, more or less. Kind of the way Australia and Manchuria are in the same general area on Earth." She shrugged and looked around the table. "It would have been _way_ too much of a coincidence if they'd been the same world."

"What about the other world Kadijatu mentioned?"

"Djenne," Daniel said. "We don't have the Gate coordinates for that world."

"Um, yes, we do," Sam blurted out. Daniel stared at her. She looked apologetic. "During the break between your two sessions, they dialed the other planet. I thought they might do that, so I set the MALP to watch the dialing sequence and record the glyphs. The address was transmitted back to us as soon as we opened the gate the second time."

"I . . . I didn't know we could do that," Daniel said. "So we're spying on them. Sam, I told Kadijatu _specifically_ that we weren't."

Sam met his look levelly. "At the moment, we're not. And it did give us the second address to check. It didn't match either." Sam looked thoughtful. "It didn't match Dad's address – and it didn't match anything else in our database, either." She turned to Teal'c. "This whole thing's got me wondering. How does a Stargate get an unlisted number, anyway?" Sam asked.

"That's a good point." Daniel was frowning. "The new world, Ghaba – the address wasn't on the Abydos cartouche. But it has a human colony, and that means Goa'uld involvement. Teal'c, just what does it take for a world to go off the grid?"

"I am not familiar with this grid."

Hammond was frowning now as well. "We know the Goa'uld don't really spend much time exploring or looking for new worlds – "

"They're too busy squabbling over the ones they've got," Daniel said.

"So, how does a world have a Stargate without having a known address?" Sam asked. "I've been wondering that since we got the extra addresses from the Ancient database. Is this a world that the Goa'uld used to control, and don't any more?" She turned to Teal'c. "Why do we find some worlds that the Goa'uld still rule, and others they've abandoned?"

Teal'c tilted his head slightly. "It would be difficult for an entire world to remain secret. The Goa'uld war amongst themselves constantly, and there are always spies." He looked around the table. "But some planets are judged to be too dangerous. They become forbidden worlds. Cimmeria was declared forbidden many centuries ago."

Sam nodded. "Like what Dad said about P7F-492 being declared off-limits after the plague."

"Wait. Waitwaitwait." Daniel was gesturing vigorously. "It doesn't make sense. How could that old man have known the Gate address of an unlisted world?"

"You are assuming it was the old man," Teal'c remarked.

"Who else?"

Sam shrugged. "Good point."

"Well, he'll be awfully conspicuous if he turns up on Ghaba," Daniel said. "From everything we've seen so far, Sam and I are going to be the only Caucasians on the whole planet." He turned to Hammond. "That is, if we're going to be there at all . . . ?"

The General turned back to Sam. "Captain, when the Ghabans dialed their other planet, what did they do?"

Teal'c turned to Sam with an inquisitive eyebrow raised, and Daniel somehow managed to scowl at Sam and look fascinated and intrigued at the same time. Sam wished she had something more exciting to report. "I couldn't see much of the activity, but the Gate actually activated twice, once in each direction. Lansana dialed out, and they hauled several cartloads of goods up the ramp and through the wormhole. Then it closed and reopened in the other direction, and it looked like they were receiving a shipment of stuff from the other side. So, um," she shrugged. "I think we were watching business as usual. Daniel, you did say Lansana's some kind of shipping clerk."

"So what – we're not going to visit them because they're too boring?"

"_Doctor Jackson_." Daniel subsided slightly at Hammond's voice. "The mission is still under consideration."

"Is it because Jack's off chasing the Tok'ra plague? Do we get sidelined just because of that?"

Hammond stood up. "I don't see any reason to delay on that account. SG-1, you have a go."

Daniel blinked, then grinned like a new morning as the sense of victory sank in.

Sam sat still, keeping her expression neutral as she waited. The team was understrength. The most reasonable approach would be to fill in by assigning a ranking officer, a major or colonel, from one of the other teams. SG-5, probably; they were out of rotation at the moment, with Lieutenant Barber recovering from a broken arm, which meant Major Harper was available . . .

"Captain Carter will command," Hammond continued with calm assurance. He looked confidently over at Sam. His expression was matter-of-fact, but there was a satisfied glint in his eye as he met hers.

"O'Neill will regret that he is not here to wish you good fortune on your command," Teal'c said.

Daniel wrinkled his face. "If he was, he wouldn't be. Wishing like that. I mean, she wouldn't be, so he wouldn't be able to."

"That is most regrettable."

- x -

Jaffa didn't need sleep, and the Goa'uld were too loftily important to get their asses stuck on dinky little ships like the one carrying Jack and Jacob, which meant the tel'taks didn't come equipped with sleeping quarters. Fortunately, the Tok'ra did sleep, so this one had been retrofitted, kind of. There were a couple of sleeping mats in a small bare room off the flight deck, originally set aside for kel'no'reem. The room had a door that opened and shut, and you could dim the lights, and goons didn't come by at odd hours and beat the crap out of you, which gave it three positive marks on the O'Neill Accommodations Scale.

On the other hand, the metal floor was hard and hummed, and after sleeping on one of those mats, Jack felt as if he'd gone a couple of rounds with a random goon or two. He tried to shake the grogginess out of his head. Count on it, the Tok'ra hadn't bothered to acquire and install coffee-making technology. Pity.

He forgot his bad mood when he stepped out onto the flight deck and saw what was outside the main window. P7-whatsit, presumably – they must have arrived while he was sleeping, and now they were in orbit, and the whole damned planet was just hanging there in space, almost close enough to touch. All those visits to other planets, and his team had only actually been _in space_ once, the only time they'd seen a planet from orbit. That time, it had been their own planet overhead, blue and green and alive and safe, and at the time, unreachable, or so they'd thought. That made it look different, of course. It had been their own planet, and they'd just saved it: that made it look even more different, way different.

This planet looked different, too. Different kind of different.

It looked . . . _raw_. The stamp of human dominion on Earth wasn't all that big from low orbit, or even from 80,000 feet in an SR-71 Blackbird, but the signs were all over the place, if you knew where to look. You could spot the Great Wall of China and the Pyramids (on a good day); on any bad day, you could see deforestation, desertification, discolored water and mottled earth. And the undying smears and streaks and webs of lights on nightside, of course, and the faint brown stain of the air over China or Africa when the dust storms were blowing.

This planet had icecaps, and a lot of blue oceans, and a lot of green and brown land, and what looked like a _lot_ of mountain ranges, especially on the land mass in what Jack decided to think of as the northern hemisphere, simply because it was facing up at the moment. High pointy mountains, if the numerous splotches of bright white snowcap and probable glacier were anything to go by. Nightside was pitch black, not a spark to be seen.

Jacob was frowning at some little screens on the control panel, and hadn't moved when Jack entered. Jack cleared his throat.

"Nice of you to let me know we were here yet."

Jacob didn't even look up. Jack tried to look over his shoulder. "What'dya got?"

Jacob manipulated some doodads, and the simple image outside the window blurred and disappeared, then reappeared as a displayed contour map, with lines and schematics and indicators superimposed over the greens and blues and browns. A bright yellow circle appeared partway down the landmass Jack had been studying, not far from the coast of a major ocean, about where Madrid might have been, if Madrid hadn't been back home on Earth.

"That's the location of the Stargate," Jacob said. "There used to be a pretty big complex nearby, but it doesn't look like anyone lives there now."

"Any signs of survivors? Are you able to, I dunno, scan or something?"

The display shifted, adding scatters of green sparks in clumps – a _lot_ of them. The clusters were far-flung, dispersed over a wide swath of the main continent. There were several pockets of the green sparkles up in the mountains, and one thick knot near the Stargate complex.

Selmak spoke. "Impressive."

"Sweet," Jack said. "Looks like they missed the memo about how they were all supposed to starve to death. What're they doing up in the mountains? Wouldn't survival be easier in the lowlands?"

"Perhaps there are floods, or wild beasts. The humans may have degenerated into hunting tribes. Perhaps they have been living in the old mineshafts as caves." A pause, and Jacob spoke instead. "The Goa'uld are dependent on their technology, and on the physical strength of the symbiotic relationship. They haven't got any real idea just what unmodified humans are capable of." Jack glanced at him, surprised; there was a note of clear pride in Jacob's voice.

"We're tougher than they think."

"Tougher than they can even imagine."

Thin white lines boxed in the area near the Stargate, and it zoomed and expanded. Jack made a face as the terrain became more visible. The Gate had been placed near where a large river had flowed into a small sea, surrounded by hills that might have been forested once. The hills were bare and showed striations from heavy erosion, sharp cuts of gullies, soils in sterile tones of yellow and grey. The river channel was fouled and the water was cloudy. The shallows of the sea showed rings of discoloration, smears of red-brown and greenish white.

"Is that what I think it is?"

"Yeah, if you think it's widespread industrial pollution from mining."

"Yeah, that's what I thought. Geez, what a mess." Jack peered at the display. "Jacob, can you pan out?" He pointed at a different watershed farther 'south' on the continent. "It looks like more of the same kind of mess, only worse. I bet it's totally _ruined_ the fishing down there."

Jacob, or maybe Selmak, snorted. "If we scan the whole planet, we'll probably find a couple dozen sites like this." Jacob. "There are several ways of processing the ore, but the easiest one makes the biggest mess. When the mess gets too bad and the slaves start dying from the poisons, the Goa'uld move the Stargate to a new location and start over."

"Great. Just great."

"Standard operating procedure on mining worlds."

Jack nodded absently. He wasn't really seeing the discolored landscape any more; his mind was making a tactical shift. They'd visited any number of planets already, usually finding the local Stargate had some kind of complex built around it – they'd gotten in the habit of thinking the Gates always stayed in the same place. That was wrong. Worse, it was sloppy. Earth's primary Stargate had been moved a dozen times just in the last century. He had to stop thinking, _now_, that the Gates were fixed objects, or someday, maybe today, he'd get blindsided by that assumption.

Jacob, or maybe Selmak, was still studying the screen. "This confirms it – we now know why Sokar wants this world so badly." Selmak.

"What?" Jack was startled out of his reveries. "I thought you said it wasn't naquadah?"

"Nope." Jacob again. Geez, Jack wished they wouldn't toggle back and forth like that. It was disorienting. "Naquadah's valuable, but there are other minerals that are a lot harder to find. And this one takes extra processing – it's really messy, the way the Goa'uld usually do it."

Jacob swivelled his chair to face Jack. "But I bet George Hammond's gonna love it when you tell him we can offer Earth a trinium mine."

- x -

Jacob unbent a bit more during the approach and landing, enough to make a half-assed flying lesson out of it. He rattled off a stream of information on what he was doing with which control, and seemed almost pleased instead of annoyed when Jack was able to follow him. After the tel'tak was safely on solid ground, tucked under the trees with the long branches settling into place around its angular sides, Jacob took his hands away from the controls and faced Jack. His gaze went blank for a moment and then glowed.

"For some reason, Jacob does not wish to say this, but I insist," came Selmak's voice, echoey and distorted. "You learn very quickly. I am most impressed."

Jack shrugged and tried not to look like the glowy eyes bugged him as much as they did. "Aw, shucks, Pa. How soon do I get the keys?"

Selmak's laugh was warm and sincere, and oddly feminine. Jack remembered Sam telling him that the host that had preceded Jacob had been a woman. _Man, that's gotta be weird._

The laugh and the glow faded. Jacob scowled. "C'mon, Colonel. Let's get to work."

They had landed on the northern continent – pseudo-northern – up in the mountains, well away from the nearest clusters of green sparks. It was full daylight, the local morning well advanced. The sky looked almost normal, a little more purple perhaps than Earth, with very ordinary-looking clouds humping along in front of an entirely ordinary-feeling brisk wind. Jack tugged the collar of his jacket up around his neck with the hand that wasn't clutching the carrier loop of a Tok'ra stasis bottle contraption.

The trees around them looked a lot like ordinary pine and fir if you didn't look at them too closely, but the smell on the wind wasn't the same as a forest back home. It never was, no matter how almost-familiar the trees themselves were. Probably something to do with the composition of the soil. Every planet had its own smell. Or stink. Plenty of them had their own stinks.

Jack wrinkled up his nose, but not at the earthy scents blown into his face by the mountain wind. He gingerly set down his burden and thumbed the activation switch on his Tok'ra communicator. "Junior's all ready for the sacrifice."

"Open it up." Jacob's voice from inside the tel'tak, slightly distorted by the communicator, but still Jacob and not Selmak.

Jack pressed the right sequence of controls on the stasis bottle, and the flat featureless top suddenly developed a clean split and yawned open. He stepped back, quickly, way back, to the edge of the clearing. The Goa'uld symbiote inside was nearly adult, Selmak had said, and would look around for an available host as soon as the stasis was broken. Jack stared, fascinated and repulsed, as the adolescent larva poked its ghastly head out, flared its frilled crest and bobbed its head, back and forth and around, blindly seeking a victim. He heard the faint, scraping squeaks it made and tried not to think about how badly he'd like to lose his breakfast.

Ten slow minutes passed. The symbiote retracted itself, skreeked and scraped, stuck its head out again. The communicator buzzed. "Anything?"

"Junior hasn't found a date for the prom yet, but he's still looking."

"No sign of sickness?"

"He's not dead yet," Jack said with false brightness. "He's getting better."

"Good enough."

_Damned humorless snakes._

"Pack him up again and bring him inside. I can run some tests while we observe him for the next several hours."

"Ex_cuse_ me?" Jack glared at his communicator. "We've given Junior plenty of time to feel his oats, and now you want me to _walk back into range of that thing?_ Jacob, I've _seen_ how far those snakes can jump."

He heard an exasperated sound. "_Fine_. Give me a moment to get on a protective mask. We can't be entirely sure yet that the air is safe for me to breathe."

Jacob didn't look at Jack as he emerged from the tel'tak, strode over to the stasis bottle and closed it up again. Jack stayed a nice, safe, healthy distance away from the bottle, hands in his pockets, until the thing was secure again.

Jacob hefted the stasis bottle and turned back towards the tel'tak. "C'mon, let's get moving. I've got a lot of tests to run on this little guy."

Jack's tight-lipped grimace twisted into a tight-lipped smile. "Ooo. _Tests_. Nothin' I like better than sittin' around while somebody does _tests_."

"Then you will be disappointed."

It was a new voice, unfamiliar, coming from an unexpected, supposedly unpopulated point on Jack's mental compass of the area. His head and weapon whipped around together to face the voice, one glance taking in the rest of the clearing.

That one glance was enough. Jack kept his gun up and centered on his target, but didn't fire, didn't even try.

_Crap._ Five – no, six, no, _seven_ people, five men and two women, emerging from the trees and dense undergrowth. They all had straight black hair and distinctly Asian features, and moved with the quiet skill of hunters, or guerillas. They wore clothing that was a mottled mishmash of dark leather and woven cloth in greens and browns, a good facsimile of camo, damned effective at blending in with this particular terrain.

Jacob had also responded, faster than Jack would've expected – having a symbiote might screw up your sense of proportion, but it sure improved reaction speed. He'd drawn a weapon Jack didn't even know he was packing. _Crap. I'm gettin' old and slow. Stupid. Every kind of stupid. _

"Drop it, _Goartu_." That was one of the women, flanking Jacob so she could look past him and watch Jack as well. She was aiming a piece of nasty-looking hardware at them. Everyone was armed, and not with rocks or sticks; the guns were unfamiliar, but they weren't low-tech. _Well, so much for the idea that they all turned back into cavemen._ The woman glared at Jacob with naked hatred.

They were smooth, and they knew what they were doing. Jack had to give them credit for that as he watched them fine-tune their relative positions. They'd placed themselves to cut Jack and Jacob off from the ship and from each other. Sweet. He couldn't have done better if he'd been leading them himself. Although, if he'd been in charge, he might have simply shot himself and Jacob without bothering to chat about it first.

The man who had spoken first was studying first Jacob, then Jack. From the way the others looked to him, Jack figured he was the group's leader.

"Cheul, are they both . . . ?" The man on Jacob's right – shorter, a little stocky – looked from the leader to Jacob and back to Jack.

A gesture from Cheul both indicated and dismissed Jack. "_That_ one is still human. That one – " he pointed his weapon at Jacob " – is a Goa'uld."

Jacob looked – well, not so much angry as insanely offended. Damn the Tok'ra. They really ought to be able to deal with that better.

"He's not," Jack said loudly. "He's a Tok'ra." Jacob glared at him. _Yeah, sure. Damned if I say it, damned if I don't._

The woman scowled, and Cheul sniffed. "Suure, dustbrain. Tell me a better one."

"It's true."

Cheul cocked his head to one side. "Yeah? That's almost worse." He gestured towards Jacob. "Better give him something to think about so he'll stay out of trouble."

The woman studied Jacob impassively for a moment, then aimed her gun and fired.

The gun spat a gout of green and yellow fire – Jack wondered, at the back of his head, if their artillery was adapted from staff weapons. There was nothing he could do; two of the others in the group had their own weapons trained on him, and they didn't look like the kind who would distract easily, or shoot wild. _Crap. How come we never get the Stormtroopers?_

Jacob yelled in pain, staggered and fell, scarlet blood pouring out of a gaping hole in his thigh. The stasis bottle clattered to the rocky ground and rolled a few feet away. Somehow, he managed to hold onto his own weapon as he fell.

"Gaesum . . . " Cheul gestured again. One of the men stepped over to where Jacob lay and collected the gun from his spasming hands, then got hold of Jacob's protective mask and yanked it off. He tossed the mask to the man closest to him, then took careful aim and shot Jacob again in the gut, at pointblank range.

_Every kind of stupid gets you dead!_

- x - x - x -_  
_


	3. Three

_**Spider's Web**_

_**Three**_

- x -

_The natives call the planet Goguryo. Not sure what that means. Daniel would know. Probably means 'lots of rocks'._

– _J. O'Neill, mission report on P7F-492_

- x -

Jacob Carter wasn't dead yet.

It even looked like he might get better. Assuming the fine folks who were currently watching him recover didn't decide to up his entertainment value by shooting him again.

Two of their captors were standing guard over him, watching him as he lay very still doing absolutely nothing, his eyes closed, his face blank. He'd long since stopped making any more of those muffled agonized noises and appeared to have passed out. There was an ugly damp patch just visible underneath his lower torso, where blood had mixed with alien dirt to form sticky mud, but the dampness had stopped spreading after only a few minutes.

Jack assumed that Selmak was hard at work patching the holes. The shots obviously hadn't been intended to kill Jacob, just put him out of commission for a while, although that gut shot would've killed anyone except a Goa'uld. Apparently the Gorgons – Go_gur_yans – didn't do things by halves. And they knew exactly what they were doing.

Since nobody was being friendly enough to introduce themselves, Jack had mentally dubbed the other three men Ping, Pang and Pong. The women were Yin and Yang. If Daniel had been here, he'd've quibbled about the Yin/Yang thing, but he wasn't.

Yin was the woman who'd looked at Jacob like he'd been a slimy insect. She was still looking at him that way as she stood guard. The other guard, Ping, was simply watching with an expressionless face. Gaesum, the guy who'd fired the second shot, had collected the stasis bottle with the Goa'uld symbiote and gone off with it, returning a few minutes later to take over guarding Jack. Pang and Pong had rifled Jacob's pockets and found a gizmo that seemed to be the remote control for the tel'tak; they'd gone inside, leaving Yang standing on alert just outside the door. Yeah, they had their moves down.

Jack was sitting on a fallen log at the side of the clearing. Gaesum had collected his MP-5 and his Beretta, as well as the Tok'ra sidearm Jacob had been carrying, and turned them over to Cheul, who examined them carefully and handed them back. Off went Gaesum again and returned empty-handed.

Once the Pang gang had the tel'tak open, Cheul left them to it, wandered over and sat down beside Jack. They studied each other for a few long silent moments. Stereotypes notwithstanding, Asia had some very clear ethnic types, and with a little practice, even a round-eye could tell a lot of them apart. Straight black hair, shoulder-length, eyes like jet and skin like weathered sand, taller than most of the Chinese or Japanese Jack had met – _Korean, maybe? Looks tough enough. Feisty enough, too._ Jack had commanded a few Korean-Americans in the Air Force; they were as rowdy as the Irish and even harder to manage. Damn good fighters, too.

Jack had no idea what snap conclusions Cheul was making about himself. He'd probably find out quick enough.

Cheul unslung a pack from his back, fished out a bottle – bottles were easy to recognize on almost every planet – drank from it and held it out. "You thirsty? It's just water."

Jack nodded, although he really wasn't. It was the first move in the next hand of the game. Besides, it wasn't a bad idea in a bad situation: you got water, food, rest whenever you could, since you didn't know when you could again. The water tasted clean enough.

Cheul jerked his head sideways in Jacob's direction. "You know you're free of him now." He rubbed his nose thoughtfully. "Funny business. I've never seen a Goa'uld host that old. And he let you carry a weapon. Interesting."

Jack made a half-strangled sound of exasperation. "_Let_ me carry . . . ? Like he could've stopped me! Like I _told_ you, he's not a Goa'uld! He's a Tok'ra!"

"You say that like it makes a difference." Cheul was watching Jack closely, his eyes sharp.

Jack gave him a sour look. "You know what the Tok'ra are, right? You know they really exist? They're not just a Jaffa fairy tale?"

"Yeah." There was an odd gleam in Cheul's eyes, almost laughter.

"Okay, so? There you are. You _gotta_ know the difference!"

Cheul shrugged. "For us, it means trouble either way."

Well, this chat was going nowhere fast. Jack decided it was time to cut and re-deal the cards. He took another drink from the water bottle and asked casually, "So how long ago did the plague die out?"

Cheul's eyes narrowed. "It didn't."

"Bull." Jack gestured towards where Jacob lay. "It must be dead, or you wouldn't've bothered with shooting him the second time. Pretty damned harsh way of dealing with unwelcome visitors. Not cool." He drummed his fingers on the water bottle. "You seem pretty jumpy for a planet that's been snake-free for a couple hundred years. How'd you know we were here?"

No answer.

"Technology? Magic? Dumb luck?"

Cheul ignored the question.

"Okay. I can play guessing games. I'm guessing the Goa'uld still want this planet. They probably like your nice shiny rocks."

Cheul didn't answer. Jack waited. After a moment, Cheul said, "Those weapons of yours. They're not Goa'uld technology. They fire solid projectiles, right?"

Jack debated not answering, but there might be more to gain by keeping the conversation going. Besides, it was a pretty obvious question. "Yeah. You got a problem with that?"

"Funny kind of weapon to be carrying. Where'd you come from? What's your home planet?"

It was Jack's turn to shrug. "C'mon. You don't really expect me to answer that, do you?"

A slow smile spread across the impassive face. "Yeah, I guess not. Too bad."

Jack gestured expansively with the water bottle. "Ya sure youbetcha. Too damned bad." Ping and Yin were still watching Jacob lying there doing nothing, and Pang and Pong and Yang were checking out the tel'tak, and it wasn't a very big tel'tak, and they'd run out of stuff to look at pretty damned quick. Gaesum was looking across the clearing at Yin and Ping, probably hoping for an excuse to shoot Jacob again.

Jacob. _Crap_. Nothing to do but hope he'd make it. Hope that, since they hadn't actually killed him yet, they'd go on not killing him.

Jack started to stand up, slowly, then winced and grunted and sat back down again, rubbing his knee. Cheul watched him sardonically as he shifted his legs and stood up again, awkwardly lurching as his knee started to buckle. Cheul looked half concerned and half annoyed and started to stand as well, holding out a hand to assist Jack. The concern splintered into doubt and suspicion the moment their hands touched, but it was too late; Jack's lurch had him moving in the right direction, with the right leverage. He gripped the arm instead of the hand, yanked and twisted, and Cheul was off-balance and toppling.

They grappled and rolled, and Jack steered them right into Gaesum's legs and bowled him over too. Cheul's grip was shifting – he was fast and strong and obviously knew some dirty tricks. Well, Jack knew some too, even dirtier; thank you, Special Forces, for the advanced degree in down-and-dirty. He'd gotten one leg wrapped around Cheul's just _so_, and he applied pressure and torque and felt Cheul's leg bones snap even as he slid out of the tangle, rolling off and away. Gaesum was struggling to his feet, but Jack was upright in time to rap Gaesum's head nice and hard with his elbow, grab the man's weapon from half-slack fingers and run.

Jack's knee was hurting for real now, but it was amazing what great stuff adrenaline could be. Oh, yeah. You hit the ground, the ground hit back – in this case, with a generous serving of little stabby stones – but you took your lumps and kept going. Now his feet were hitting the ground hard, the hard rhythm that he could keep going for as long as he had to. _Every kinda stupid _– no, bad idea, no time to let the thoughts go down _that_ road. Like the body, the mind could be disciplined. It had to be, especially when the stuff hit the fan. No thinking about what might happen to Jacob, not yet. One thing at a time.

He found the one thing soon enough, backtracking along the line Gaesum had followed when he'd left the clearing and returned. Jack knew there had to be something back there: the Goguryans hadn't fallen out of the sky, after all. Well, not exactly, not all by themselves. A ring platform, maybe, although you'd think Jacob and Selmak would've spotted those from orbit – or maybe not? The ring transporters used a lot of power, but maybe they didn't show up on scanners the way the Stargate did. Still, what were the odds that Selmak would land near one, close enough to get them ambushed, with the whole planet to choose from?

Jack crested a rise and saw that the odds weren't quite that skewed. Not a ring platform. And the friendly natives definitely weren't primitive savages, just in case there was still any question about that. He'd guessed they had to have some kind of transport, although he hadn't expected anything like this.

It was funny: the Goa'uld and the Jaffa didn't seem to have anything between shank's mare and Death Gliders – no cars or trucks or motorcycles, nothing for ground transport. It probably had a lot to do with the fact that under the Goa'uld, you were either a high muckity-muck or a slave. This world had been on its own long enough to have time to figure out some solutions that the Goa'uld probably wouldn't have gone for. Such as personal transportation.

There were four small vehicles, each with two seats, clustered together in a little clearing next to a ravine. They looked a bit like miniature gliders, and a bit like motorcycles, and a lot like something that had been assembled out of spare parts. It looked like the Goguryans had plenty of extra trinium handy; a lot of the parts were shiny silver. That meant lightweight and heavy-duty, a good combination. The controls looked a lot like the ones on the tel'tak.

Each one had a semitransparent plate on the side, with a yellow-green glow within. Jack quickly found that the plate could be flipped open. He recognized the little naquadah bulb thingy inside – the locals must've managed to stash a bunch of staff weapons when they'd been cut off from the Goa'uld empire and left to die. They'd adapted them into much more practical sidearms, and it looked like they'd also figured out how to use them for gas tanks.

The naquadah bulb thingy looked like it could be unplugged. Crazy dangerous, of course. Almost as dangerous as it would be just to take one of the little vehicles and leaving the others intact, with a pack of pissed-off locals on his ass. Well, sometimes you had to take risks, crazy risks. Adrenaline was good for that, too. He gritted his teeth, pulled his jacket sleeve down to wrap his fingers, found the base of one of the bulbs, twisted and pulled. It came out in his hand. It didn't blow his hand off: good. It felt warm, no, hot: bad. He threw it off into the ravine. It didn't blow up there either: good. He yanked the others out and threw them in random directions, leaving one glider-cycle-thing still usable. He climbed on it, thanked a godless heaven for the flying lesson Selmak had given him, and hit the activation control.

Jack had been in the Air Force for 25 years, and he still didn't have his wings, which still burned his butt, but what could you do? He'd done his training but never officially met the qualifying time, since several – events – that might have counted towards the required minimum hours had officially never happened, so there you were. But he really liked flying. And he liked things that flew. He _really_ liked these things.

- x - x -

"Daniel, when you get the chance, can you ask what some of this is?" Sam gestured towards the table that had been laid out in their guest quarters in what seemed to be the governmental center on Ghaba. "The only thing I recognize is the rice."

After one memorable early trip off-world, Colonel O'Neill had tried to ban all native food. That hadn't lasted long. As Daniel had pointed out, trust was essential in the development of interworld relations, gratuitous offense given to cultural expectations could be just as dangerous as an armed threat or more so, and food was central to most cultures. After only a few months, the restriction was abandoned. Nowadays, SGC personnel slated for offworld missions were advised to acquire an adventurous palate and a cast-iron gut, not necessarily in that order.

"That's not rice. It's millet."

"Oh." Sam studied her plate. "Isn't that what you feed to birds?"

Daniel looked annoyed. "According to Samuel Johnson, oatmeal was only fit for horses. Millet's a perfectly good cereal grain. They've been growing it in Asia for over ten thousand years."

Teal'c tilted his head slightly as he refilled his plate – Sam hadn't been counting, but she guessed it was the third time at least. "It is most sustaining."

"It goes pretty well with whatever the meat is, anyway."

"Do you want me to ask about that?"

"On second thought, no." Scientific inquiry occasionally needed some limits. Especially at breakfast.

As offworld guest quarters went, the Colonel would have given these a pretty good rating. The furnishings were serviceable rather than fancy, but the suite was clean and comfortable, free of bugs and vermin and livestock, airy and not too hot even in the late afternoon. The place was built of adobe or something similar, like most of the buildings they'd seen so far. As Teal'c had quietly noted in O'Neill's absence, it was reasonably defensible. It even seemed private – there'd been no signs of anyone trying to eavesdrop, anyway. Privacy was hard to find in some cultures. The Ghabans also had better than average hygiene and plumbing, and they'd discovered the gravity shower, which earned special marks from Sam.

And there was coffee, which ought to rank the planet high on any scale of civilization that actually mattered. The Ghabans brewed it in gourds and kept it warm in double-walled pottery vessels, and Daniel had almost cheered when he spotted it on the breakfast table the first morning. It tasted a bit odd but not too bitter, had the approximate specific gravity of mercury and was strong enough to use as weed-killer.

Daniel was fumbling with the coffee now, bleary-eyed.

"How late did they keep you up?"

Daniel blinked. "I have no idea." He rubbed an ear. "After all the times, all the effort I've had to make sometimes to get indigenous groups to talk to me, it's kind of disconcerting getting my ears talked off without having to work for it."

Teal'c lifted an eyebrow, looked carefully at Daniel's ear on the side closest to himself, and returned his attention to his breakfast. Sam and Daniel could almost hear the distinctive sound of another Earth expression being noted and filed. _Mission report, Day Two: no significant progress towards obtaining a source of trinium, but Teal'c caught and tagged three idiomatic expressions and one slang term in its native habitat._

"So what've you got?" Sam asked.

Daniel wrinkled his nose. "Not a lot, exactly. They're pretty relaxed in their attitudes about how long things take. Um . . . "

Sam knew where his thoughts must be heading, even though his not-yet-caffeinated state made it hard for him to articulate. "I know, this kind of thing takes time. We're not in any hurry to leave – in fact, we're definitely going to be here for several more days at least. I'm just curious."

She could see a line of tension leave Daniel's neck. He nodded. "It's going to take time. They have a very . . . colorful approach to their own history."

"What? They're all liars?"

"That's not exactly how they think of it themselves. They seem to feel that a little, um, embroidery will improve any story. Including their own past."

Teal'c was frowning now. "Those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it. This is a saying amongst your own people. What of those who choose to remember incorrectly?"

"Actually, in the case of these people, they're doomed to repeat their history dozens of times, changing it a little each time and discussing whether the new version is an improvement. And laughing at the whole process."

- x -

Daniel was shown the Great Hall of Telling on his tour of the state complex, but that was apparently reserved for major festivals and celebrations. Their destination for the day had been a smaller chamber, with comfortable seats, excellent acoustics, and braziers for warmth when the day worked its way around to evening and turned chilly. The locals didn't seem to use electricity, but they had plenty of the glowing light units the Goa'uld used – the Goa'uld lights could last for centuries, and any colony with a supply of them wasn't likely to bother inventing the light bulb.

Liars or not, they were masters of their art, and Daniel took pains to pick his first stories carefully and tell them well. The Ghabans were bound to be good listeners, but this group were obvious connoisseurs. Still, he had a formidable arsenal on his side – his hosts had been taken from Earth long before many of the great epics had been written, or written down, anyway. He politely deferred to the older _griots_, which earned him points for good manners, and paid careful attention to the kind of stories they chose for the first round, which gave him a good idea of what they'd like to hear as well as a quick lesson in the local style.

"Now I am waking him up, he listens to my tale, we all listen. In the land of my ancestors, long generations past, a kindly king ruled a land called by its people – Denmark." A pause as the listeners considered the alien name, with its harsh, barbaric sound. "He had a son, one single son, a fine warrior and a man of learning, who was named Hamlet . . . "

- x -

"They _liked_ Hamlet?"

Daniel looked at Sam with annoyance. "You don't have to sound so surprised." A change came over his face, a shadow of bitterness. "They liked it enough to give me _this_, anyway." He turned to the low bench where he'd dumped his jacket the previous night, rooted around for a moment, and held up one of the Ghaban neckrings. The hammered silver band was a quarter-inch wide, chased with abstract designs.

"It's trinium, isn't it? All the neckrings are. _That's_ why we're here, right? The stuff is _everywhere_. Hell, they use it for windchimes! That's why Hammond was so eager for us to come here, isn't it? It's not like we actually _care_ anything about these people, what they've been through, how they got here and how they freed themselves. We're just here for _this_." He dropped the neckring on the table. It struck a serving spoon as it fell and rang with a clear metallic note.

Sam drew in a breath. Would the Colonel have tried to prevaricate, to make up some story to soften the blow, to try to make Daniel more willing to play his indispensable role? Well, what her CO might or might not have chosen to do or say in her place didn't matter. He wasn't here, and she was.

"Yes." She met Daniel's eyes without flinching, saw his lips thin and twist. "That's why the mission was approved so fast. Daniel, you know what it would mean to Earth." She picked up the neckring and turned it in her fingers. "But it's not the _only_ reason we're here. We're here because someone gave us the address. We were invited. We don't know who he was or why, but I'm not leaving till we find out."

Teal'c had become very still when Daniel's outburst began. Now he extended a hand, and Sam gave him the neckring without demur. He turned it thoughtfully in his fingers.

"This is unlike the others we have seen. Is it a special badge of honor?"

Daniel nodded. "The _griots_ – the professional members of the storytelling clan – they seem to be the only ones who wear this type of ring."

"These people are important?"

"Well, _griots_ still exist in contemporary Mandé culture." Sam hid a smile. It was almost magic, the effect it had on Daniel when you asked him a question: turn on the words and everything else was set aside for the moment, for as long as it took for the answer to pour out. "They're the professional entertainment and PR specialists and journalists and historians and genealogists and legal experts and living walking cultural libraries all in one, so yeah, you could say they're important."

Teal'c looked pleased. "Then they have recognized how high your own status is. This is very good."

Daniel managed to look simultaneously deflated and reassured. Sam took the ring from Teal'c, nodding. "Which makes this your press card and your diplomatic credentials all rolled into one. I'd call that really great progress, especially for the first day."

Teal'c tilted one thoughtful eyebrow. "Did you tell them the entire saga, Daniel Jackson?"

"What?"

"Hamlet. It is a very . . . _long_ tale. Is that why you returned at such a late hour?"

Daniel almost laughed and Teal'c almost smiled as the tension eased. "Well, no. I abridged it. It's common practice with long sagas to break them into episodes. We basically spent the day giving out free samples from our stashes, trying to get each other hooked before we brought out the full menu of longer goodies." He drew a deep breath and looked serious again. "The point is, yes, they liked it . . . they _really_ liked the bit where Hamlet pretended to be crazy."

Sam and Teal'c looked at each other, then back at Daniel.

"You remember they said their great epic of liberation is called the Song of the Children of Anansi." Daniel interrupted himself with a laugh. "It's funny. Even without Jack here, I can almost hear him saying, 'So who's this Nancy person?'"

Sam took the bait. "Okay. So who's this Nancy person?"

"Anansi the Spider is a figure from West African folklore. Anansi is a trickster figure. Mostly, he tries to get the other animals to do his work for him, or give him their food – he's fat and lazy and ineffective, but he always comes out ahead in the end."

"This sounds like Homer Simpson," Teal'c said gravely.

"Well, not really. Anansi was more than just a lazy slob – he's an example of the trickster archetype. Every culture has trickster stories. It's one of the most universal mythological elements there is, right up there with heroes and quests. I bet even the Jaffa have something along those lines, don't they?"

Teal'c's face was composed, but the other two caught the faint hesitation before he spoke. "Indeed. There are tales of those who have sought to trick or deceive the System Lords."

"There, you see?" Daniel said triumphantly.

"They are tales of warning," Teal'c added. "The would-be deceiver is always discovered, and suffers a hideous and painful death."

"Oh." Daniel coughed, looked nonplussed, and drained his remaining coffee. Sam handed him the coffee gourd for a refill. "Anyway. It's a big thing for them – even though we were only trading excerpts, it looks like a _lot_ of their stories are variations on the trickster theme. I really hope I can get them going on their liberation mythology today . . . when you think about it, we're used to hearing about the Goa'uld being overthrown or defeated, not conned."

"The Colonel would love that," Sam said thoughtfully.

"No kidding. And hey! I think I've figured out which System Lord originally enslaved them – I mean, who it was who took them from Earth in the first place . . . " Daniel saw Teal'c's expression and broke off, even though there was hardly any change in the way Teal'c looked. It was funny, how they'd all thought at first that Teal'c was entirely impassive. When you got right down to it, he said just as much as anyone else did; he just used fewer words.

Teal'c spoke, a single word. "Sokar."

"You already knew?" Daniel looked from Teal'c to Sam and back again.

Sam cleared her throat. "Teal'c had an – encounter – with some of the natives. Yesterday, while you were getting your ears talked off."

- x -

Teal'c had known immediately that he was being followed.

Once he had determined the nature of those stalking him, he saw no reason not to permit the exercise to continue. Eventually, however, his pursuers grew too clumsy for him to allow it to pass. It was easy enough for him to turn the tables: a sudden check, a sidestep and an arm reaching behind a barrel, poorly and hastily chosen as cover, and he was lifting a squirming fistful of the garment of the one he had surmised was the leader of the hunters.

The small dark face was shining with sweat: the day was warm and Teal'c had made the children work to keep up with him. The large dark eyes were also shining – with admiration. Teal'c wasn't accustomed to seeing that particular emotion directed at him, especially not with such frank glowing innocence.

He deposited the boy in front of him and hunkered down to meet the admiring gaze on the level. "You must learn to be more cunning when you follow a foe, little man. You were very careless when you ran across the alley. You should have waited until I was closer to the corner." Teal'c glowered slightly, but the bright face before him did not dim. He cleared his throat. "You may instruct the others to come out of hiding now."

There were six of them: three boys, two girls, and one toddler so young Teal'c couldn't even begin to guess. The toddler was apparently the responsibility of the older girl. They were all dark-haired and dark-eyed, but two of them, apparently a brother and sister, had different skin tones from the others, and the eyes were a complete giveaway.

- x -

"From what Teal'c saw, there's a second ethnic group. And they're Asian."

Daniel looked intrigued. "Huh. Where did the second group come from? That's not the usual Goa'uld pattern. If they're intermarrying, I wonder how that works with the Ghaban clan system . . . were the mixed-race kids dressed any differently?"

- x -

The children were dressed much the same, and were all equally well decorated with dirt from their games. The third boy had drawn a squiggle on his forehead; he was the first to overcome his shyness and start peppering questions at Teal'c. The others soon followed, and the alleyway rang with their chatter.

"The tale is you're a great warrior!"

"The tale is true." The children had a peculiar way of phrasing their questions. He must remember to tell Daniel Jackson about it.

"The tale is that your warrior's mark is, um, part of you? It will always be there?"

"The tale is true."

"Can I touch it?" That was the boy with the squiggle, whose eyes glowed with excitement. "When my father served with the Amadou, he bore a mark on his forehead, but it faded away when he returned home. Now you cannot even see it was there." He was clearly disappointed.

"Why did he bear this mark?"

The boy looked confused. "Because he was with the Amadou." From his tone, this was so self-explanatory that the question was meaningless.

Teal'c found himself seated on the ground, waiting patiently while the child carefully traced the lines of Apophis' brand. He couldn't feel the touch of the small fingertips, but he could feel the warmth of the hand near his skin. The boy turned and beamed at the others, and the smaller girl climbed into Teal'c's lap, and the first boy remembered his leadership but forgot his dignity and the words poured out in an excited torrent.

"The tale is you have swallowed one of the demon-snakes! And it lives in your belly! And your warrior's might comes from its power! And you take from it long life and the will to smite your foes, and you do battle against the snake demons, and they curse your name, and . . . and . . . " The child ran out of breath. Teal'c realized he was holding his own breath, and had been since the tumbled cascade of questions began, waiting for the eagerness to turn sour and twisted and hate-filled. O'Neill would have said he was waiting for the other shoe to drop: a curious expression, but – like most Tau'ri turns of phrase – one that made much sense once considered properly.

- x -

"Wait – " Daniel interrupted Teal'c. "Wait. They already knew about you?"

"They knew some things, and wished to know more. They wanted me to tell them the story of the revolt against Apophis, and of his death, and any other tale I cared to tell them about our battles against the false gods. They were most taken with the idea of false gods. I believe they intended to make a game of it."

"Um, how much did you tell them?"

Teal'c frowned. "I told them that we fought against Apophis many times. I told them how we destroyed his great ships when they came to conquer the world of the Tau'ri, and how the exploding ships lit up the night sky, brighter than any stars." Teal'c studied Daniel's grimacing face. "Did you not tell them about it yourself?"

"Well, no, not yet."

"But you have been speaking with them for the last day and half the night."

Daniel threw up his hands. "I was holding out on them! They _really_ want that one, you see."

Sam broke in. "Stories actually serve as trade goods, then?"

"Yes. And some are worth more than others. You see, we haven't actually traded a lot of stories about the Goa'uld yet – we've been kind of working our way up to that. They found out too fast that we really wanted theirs, and they really want ours, and first we kind of have to work out just how good our stories are compared to theirs . . . it's kind of complicated."

"You're establishing the currency exchange rate," Sam said.

"Well, yeah, I guess."

- x -

Eventually, Teal'c found an opening between questions to ask one of his own. "Soumaba. You say your father bore a mark when he served as a warrior. What did this mark look like?"

Soumaba, the boy with the squiggle, squatted and drew a blobby mark that Teal'c guessed was supposed to be an ear of grain. "Our clan is Koroma, see? This is our clan-mark. My father is very strong! When the donkey would not haul his load one day, my father picked up the donkey and put him down again in front of the cart and said, 'See? You must work harder, or I will make you into soup and feed you to Wagadou-Bida!'"

"Indeed?" Teal'c studied the mark solemnly. "How long did your father serve?"

"Five years! He was a fine warrior! Most only serve two years."

"Does everyone serve for only a short time?"

Soumaba nodded. "My father says it is what Anansi taught us. All must take their stand and learn to defend our people, so we shall be strong when the Demon-Snakes return."

"Indeed. The tale is that they will return?"

Myung turned her large dark eyes to Teal'c. "The tale is that you will aid us when the High Lord of the Demon-Snakes comes to enslave us again," she said earnestly. "Is that tale true?"

- x -

Sam smiled when Teal'c reached that part of his story, although she had found it hard to smile the day before, when he'd first told her. She would have had difficulty replying, if they'd asked her. She might have answered with false confidence, or hedged and tried to cover her butt. Teal'c, now – he'd simply inclined his head and told the kids, "The tale is true."

- x -

Soumaba struck a pose and puffed out his chest. "When it is _my_ turn to serve, I shall follow my father and my clan will be proud!"

Esi, the little girl in Teal'c's lap, made a rude noise. "Koroma! Dumb as donkeys. You smell like a donkey!"

"Do not!"

Teal'c reached out a hand and intercepted Soumaba's attempt to cuff the girl. He glowered down at her. "Pray refrain from making these observations unless there is truth to them. Do you understand?" Esi nodded, mutely but vigorously. "Very good."

He turned back to the others. "Is this Wagadou-Bida the 'Demon-Snake' who first brought your people here?"

Headshaking all around.

"Anansi brought us here."

"He sent us here. He sent our ancestors."

"He hid us. He stole us from Wagadou-Bida!"

"Wagadou-Bida smells like a donkey!"

"Shhh!" Esi's insult clearly shocked the older children. Teal'c found comfort in this: it was good to see that, no matter what the planet, children tended to behave the same. He chose his next question carefully.

"Do you know what mark the servants of Wagadou-Bida bore upon their foreheads? Was it the same as mine, the mark of Apophis?"

Another round of vigorous headshaking. Maja, the boy who'd led the group as they stalked Teal'c, squatted and drew in the dust. "This is the mark, my father told me. He said to remember it." His dark finger had hardly finished before the hand darted out again and wiped the symbol away. "He said it is evil. Those who bear that mark are accursed."

Teal'c nodded solemnly. "Your father is wise."

- x -

"It was the mark of Sokar," Teal'c declared.

Sam grimaced and Daniel nodded. "That's a five-pointed reversed star, right? Point down?"

"It is."

"Well, that's doesn't really come as a surprise." Daniel sighed and rubbed his forehead. "So this was another one of Sokar's colonies. Which means we _really_ need to know how the hell these people got away from him."

Sam was frowning. "What's the deal with this – what was the name? Wagadoo?"

"Wagadou-Bida. Or Bida. The black many-headed serpent demon who controlled the ancient empire of Ghana, in sub-Saharan Africa." Daniel rattled off the information as if he'd been reciting his phone number.

"Daniel, are there any legends that you _don't_ know?"

"Um, plenty? C'mon. Don't be surprised, Sam. The year I was on Abydos, once I realized there was more than one Stargate, more than one Goa'uld out there – I started going through it all in my head. Do you have any idea just how many myths and legends there are on Earth, of demonic possession by snakes or similar evil spirits? Once you re-examine world mythology with an eye for Goa'uld patterns of activity, you find examples everywhere. I was surprised once I started to put them together, but I guess I shouldn't have been. I just wish I could _publish_ some of this. Did you know there's actually an ongoing argument about whether the word 'griot' is indigenous to the Mandé culture or borrowed from early European visitors? I could settle that controversy _tomorrow_ if it weren't for the secrecy thing."

"Um, Daniel – "

"Oh. Right. Anyway, after I was back on Earth at the SGC, I took the list I'd started and put together a database of related myths."

"And the Wagadou story was one of them?"

"Yeah. At first I thought it couldn't be related, because it's too late in history – the empire of Ghana hit its peak around 800 AD, and we originally thought that was way too late for Goa'uld interference on Earth. We know better now, of course – the System Lords continued to abduct seed populations for slave colonies long after the defeat of Ra. Anyway, according to Ghanaian myth, Wagadou-Bida was a black snake with seven heads, who made the rulers of ancient Ghana wealthy beyond imagination, but demanded human sacrifice in return. Sound familiar? He was defeated by a warrior named Amadou Sefedokote, whose promised bride, Sia, had been claimed by the serpent-god as a sacrifice." Daniel swallowed hard.

"'Amadou'?" Teal'c asked. "That is what the children called the warriors here."

"Yeah, I thought that was very interesting. It doesn't just mean 'warrior' – it means 'liberator'. And here's something else: in the ancient myth, 'Ghaba' was the name of the grove where the sacrifices were taken – the site of the battle in which Wagadou-Bida was defeated."

"So, Wagadoo – " Sam recalled Colonel O'Neill's habit of taking long and awkward names and terms and dumbing them down, or pranking them up. It was usually annoying, of course, but she felt a sudden sympathy with him. "Wagadou-Bida," she said clearly. "It's not usual for the Goa'uld to use pseudonyms, at least not as far as we've seen. So, was Wagadou-Bida the same as Sokar? Maybe another Goa'uld in Sokar's service?"

"'Bida' might have been the name of Sokar's First Prime," Daniel mused. "The business about the seven heads might have been a mythic re-imagining of a troop of seven warriors, acting as one. In the tale, each head is cut off separately and flies to a different location."

"Is Anansi part of that same story?"

Daniel shook his head. "Not at all. The folk tales that feature him aren't even part of the same body of literature."

"Then what's the tie-in?"

"I have no idea. After what Teal'c's kids said – "

"They were not my children, Daniel Jackson."

"I know that. The sooner I can get the adults to start talking about Anansi, the better." He picked up the trinium neckring again and turned it over in his hands. "And speaking of getting the adults back to talking . . . I have to figure out how the catch on this thing works . . . Sam, can you take a look at it?" He glanced over at Teal'c, who was nodding slightly, and back at Sam as she took the ring. "You weren't expecting to send it back to Earth as a sample, I hope? I really need to be wearing it the next time they see me."

Sam found the spot where the clasp was concealed and peered at the mechanism. "Wow. That's pretty fine metalwork there. No, after last time, we're not looking for samples. We need a _source_ for trinium, not a suitcase of loot, and that means a solid basis for permanent trade relations, which means mutual ongoing benefit of the kind that will last, and that means," she handed Daniel the ring, "go out there and kick some storytelling butt. Find out what they need. Even if it's a stack of DVD players and a complete set of _I Love Lucy._"

Daniel gave her a sardonic look as he put the ring on. "Did General Hammond get pushy on you when you did the 24-hour check-in yesterday?"

Sam made a face. "Not exactly."

- x -

SG-1 missed its regularly scheduled check-in time because Sam hadn't made a reservation. It hadn't occurred to her that she would need one.

Lansana was excited and apologetic, but very clear on his inability to interrupt the established schedule of wormhole passage between Ghaba and Djenne. He promised to squeeze Sam in as soon as he could, which couldn't possibly be until after the end of the current window, but late afternoon was a very busy time, and he would have to warn his counterpart on Djenne that there would be an interruption, and he was very sorry not to be able to accommodate her more quickly, but there was really nothing he could do until the end of the current inbound window.

He wasn't kidding about how busy it was. Sam waited, trying to contain her impatience, and watched the traffic. A steady tide of people streamed out of the gate, walking mostly in small groups, talking, laughing, taking cheerful leave of each other after they'd passed through. The crowd was all adults, mostly in their 20s and 30s, some older. _Rush hour_, Sam thought. She asked Lansana, "Why such a crowd? What were they all doing on the other planet?"

He blinked at her in surprise. "That is where they work. It is the end of the day there. It is later there than it is here right now."

The inbound traffic was all people, no goods this time. Lansana shifted next to her, glanced at her, cleared his throat. Sam noticed he was wearing two neckrings now, instead of the single one he'd had on when they first saw him. Promotion or commendation? A reward for having made first contact? She wondered if it would be polite to mention it. She realized he was trying to get up the nerve to speak to her. She gave him one of her best smiles and did her best to look approachable.

"Um, Captain Carter – "

"Yes?"

"May I ask you a question, if it is not rude?"

_That's a question already._ Sam stifled the thought. "Sure."

"My sisters and brothers have asked me, and I could not answer them."

"Shoot." Lansana looked puzzled. "I mean, go ahead."

"Your eyes," he blurted out. "They are such a strange faded color. Can you see as others do? They do not pain you?"

Sam grinned. "My eyes are fine. The color is normal amongst our people. My hair color is also normal."

"Ah! The hair. Yes, I was asked about your hair."

"By your brothers?"

"No." Lansana looked at his feet. His skin was so dark that it was hard to tell, but Sam was sure he was blushing. "My sweetheart asked me. She is very curious. I told her, she does not have to worry about the woman from off-world, the woman with the young face and old hair." He raised his hand to brush his fingers across his own cheek. "Are you very old?"

- x -

Daniel laughed as she told him. "You've confused them. There's only one reason for anyone here to have light-colored hair – well, there might be one reason other than age, but under the Goa'uld recessive traits such as albinism tend to get bred out, so that's unlikely. But it's really a compliment. Age and authority go together here. Since you're obviously in charge, you must be old."

"Lansana's not very old."

"He's in a position of responsibility, not authority."

- x -

The conversation had languished after Sam assured Lansana, a bit stiffly, that she wasn't all that old. Small talk was especially difficult when you were feeling your way around a new culture and didn't yet know what might be confusing, or offensive. "So," she said brightly. "Your, um, sweetheart." Good topic? Bad topic? Tough topic. _So, what does she do?_ would've been the natural thing to ask, but it was one of those casual questions that didn't usually go over well off-world. "Um, are you two engaged or anything?"

The young man's face fell. "We would like that, but I don't have enough status yet to ask for her." He touched the rings at his neck "I work hard! I am good at my work. My elders are pleased with me."

"So, what does she do?" Sam found herself asking before she could stop herself. Inwardly, she kicked her own shin.

For once, the question wasn't a problem, although the answer didn't convey much. "Her clan is Garanké. She is an apprentice. This year, she is learning to blow the glass. It is very difficult work." Lansana drew himself up to his full height. "Very important."

"Why's that so important?" Sam recalled the absence of light bulbs in the dwellings.

"Everyone needs the glass! Those who work with the plants and make the medicines, the Dambuya who make the discoveries . . . there is much status even in making the glass vessels. My Astou, she has very clever hands. Very small, but very strong."

The inbound wormhole closed at last. Sam tried not to fidget as Lansana dialed up Djenne and sent a message through, letting his counterpart on the other side know there was a change in schedule. The message was incised into a 'memory stick' like the one that had sent SG-1 here in the first place, and hand-carried by a small barefoot boy, with a stern enjoinder not to pester the Gate attendants on Djenne, not to get into trouble, and to return immediately when the next scheduled inbound wormhole allowed transit.

As the shimmer marking the outbound wormhole shivered into empty nothingness, Lansana looked at Sam with a thoughtful gleam in his eyes. "You spoke to us, before you came, through your devices." He gestured at the MALP. "Is this a difficult thing to do? Is it something you could teach us? It would be so much easier if we did not have to send small boys through the Sky-Ring every time there is a message. Even the best small boy can be very naughty."

Sam grinned. "It's very easy. The equipment you need isn't that bulky – I'm sure our people have plenty we can offer each other. I'll make sure I tell my superiors – um, my clan elders – that you'd find radio equipment immediately useful."

As she began to dial the Gate address for Earth, she checked and frowned. The DHD symbols weren't in the usual configuration; she had to hunt for each one, and it took longer than usual to dial the familiar sequence. Now that she thought about it, she'd peripherally noticed that when they'd watched the recorded footage from the MALP, but at the time, she'd been focused on identifying the glyphs in the Gate address for Djenne.

She pressed the last symbol, the point of origin for Ghaba, and frowned harder as she reached for the central activation control. The first six symbols had activated the chevrons on the Stargate, but she hadn't heard the familiar _chunk_ sound when the seventh chevron locked. Instead, the symbols went dark, and the round red globe under her hand remained unlit.

She hadn't misdialed. She knew that. She knew the DHD worked; she'd just watched it used.

Sam drew a deep breath and closed her eyes for a moment. She visualized the DHD controls as she knew them, each symbol in its place. The major symbols were consistent on every DHD. Some of the devices had minor differences, with a few of the less-common symbols varying in some parts of the galaxy, but she'd have been willing to swear, before this, that she knew the address for Earth well enough to dial it with her eyes closed.

She'd better. It was what she had to do now.

She opened her eyes to slits and watched her hand as she pressed the keys, ignoring the symbols as they were marked, dialing by position. She heard the Gate start to spin, heard the first six chevrons activate, heard the deadly silence when she pressed the seventh, felt her stomach dive into a dark cold pit as she placed her palm against the smooth cool surface of the central red crystal and felt it remain inert under her hand as the sequence fizzled and failed.

- x - x - x -_  
_


	4. Four

_**Spider's Web**_

_**Four**_

- x -

_According to _[redacted] Daniel [resume]_ Doctor Jackson, the name 'Ghaba' means 'grove', and has some kind of cultural/mythic significance. The area around the main settlement, Kumbi, is mostly semitropical savanna and low hills, primarily used for agriculture and animal husbandry. The hills are densely wooded and show a high degree of biodiversity._

_There are several other settlements nearby, connected by well-maintained roads and a simple rail system of metal tracks, used to move supplies and goods via donkey-drawn carts. Construction is mostly adobe. The hub of the rail system is the freight handling area near the Gate; the tracks run up the ramp to the Gate itself, for shifting goods between worlds. __It seems the donkeys don't like Gate travel and won't haul carts across the event horizon, _[redacted]which shouldn't surprise anyone. C'mon. They're donkeys_. _[resume]_ Note to Dr. Hana: as you surmised, even domesticated animals usually resist Gate travel, some species being less tractable than others. This supports your theory that most transplanted species were deliberate imports, with intrusion by accidental invasives remaining an unusual event. _[redacted] Maybe now we can stop worrying about causing wholesale ecological destruction if we let a stray mosquito through. [resume]_ It seems likely that indigenous species subsequently adapt around the resulting ecological niches._

_No mountains in the vicinity, and the hills aren't much more than weathered bumps. No signs of any mining activity, past or present. Refinement facilities are apparently located offworld, on Djenne. Mineral samples completely incompatible with the type of deposits presumed characteristic for trinium ore _[redacted] based on a grand total of one example to date_._ [resume]_ No suspiciously convenient pseudo-supernatural spirits leaving refined ore nuggets lying around in the creek for anyone to pick up. Where the hell is the stuff coming from?_

– _S. Carter, mission report on P7R-684, draft notes_

- x -

Daniel stared at Sam, stared at Teal'c, stared at Sam again. "Wait. Wait a minute. You're telling me we're stranded? Why didn't you tell me already? Teal'c, did you know – of course you knew, why am I asking?"

"_Dan_iel." Sam was relieved to see Daniel subside slightly at the firm tone. "I'm telling you now. And I don't think we're actually stranded; it's just going to take some extra time and work until we can dial home. I did tell you that we're going to be here for at least a few days. And we're not cut off entirely."

- x -

After the second failure, Sam studied the DHD thoughtfully, examining the placement of the symbols and comparing it with her memory of the usual layout. She couldn't immediately see any pattern to the changes – nothing as simple as a rotation or displacement. Lansana was watching her with a puzzled frown, obviously wondering why she hadn't opened a wormhole yet. She drew a deep breath, not sure what to tell him, and was interrupted by the _chunk_ of a chevron as the Gate began to activate.

The fountain of the incoming wormhole had barely settled before Sam heard the welcome buzz of static from the radio receiver on the MALP. General Hammond's voice crackled at her. "SG-1, report. Respond, please. You are overdue."

- x -

"Was he upset?" asked Daniel.

"He wasn't happy about it," Sam said. "I told him that one of your Children of Anansi here had apparently gotten very clever and scrambled the keys on the DHD. We discussed options and they sent me some extra equipment and supplies on a second MALP. They'll continue to dial us for daily check-ins until we're able to dial out again."

"Don't call us, we'll call you."

"Yeah."

"So what options have we got? I assume you can't just punch keys at random till you hit something."

Sam nodded. "I have to assume they scrambled both DHDs – the one here and the one on Djenne. I'm assuming – I'm _hoping_ – that the encryption is the same on both DHDs. I need to get to Djenne."

Daniel nodded. "I bet you can easily wangle an invitation to go tour the facilities there. Hell, just mention that you're interested and I bet they'll set it up on the spot."

"I'll need to stay overnight for at least one night."

"Okay. But why?"

"If I can make sufficiently accurate astronomical observations, I should be able to calculate the specific location of Djenne and work out its actual Gate address. If I can find out what symbols they use for the Ghaban address, that will give me two addresses I'm sure of – both the real address and the scrambled one, I mean. I can start to work out a decryption key for the DHDs from that with a minimum of trial and error."

Daniel mimed counting on his fingers. "That was – how many 'ifs' in a row there?"

"Two," said Teal'c promptly.

"Unless you count the bit about whether the encryption is the same, which makes three," Daniel added a third finger. "I thought the number of Gate symbols made it way too complicated to be solved as a math problem, even with computers."

"Well, yes, the number of possible combinations is a 43-digit number. Kind of gives a whole new meaning to 'astronomical', doesn't it? But I'm starting out with one symbol I already know for certain – actually, it'll be two confirmed symbols – "

Daniel snapped his fingers. "The point of origin always comes last. So you'll have the point-of-origin symbols for Ghaba and Djenne."

She nodded excitedly. "Once I've got both addresses decrypted, that give me fourteen symbols out of 39. Either there's overlap between those symbols and the seven glyphs we need, which will give me part of the key, or else there's no overlap, which reduces the number of possible permutations to a 22-digit number, and I can go on from there. The first step is to make the observations so I can calculate the actual Gate address for Djenne, and cross-reference the two encrypted addresses with our list of required glyphs for planets with known addresses. I should be able to start identifying some of the unknown symbols by limiting the variables."

Sam cut herself off and examined Daniel's expression, trying to figure out whether he had actually followed any of it.

"Like playing Hangman with glyphs?" he said at last.

"Well, yeah. Pretty much." She frowned thoughtfully at Teal'c's apparent lack of expression. "Okay, Teal'c. Spit it out."

Teal'c considered his now empty plate. "There is nothing for me to spit out, Captain Carter."

"I meant, what's on your mind?"

"I am still trying to consider what tactical advantage the Ghabans might gain from sabotaging their own dialing device."

"You think they did it themselves?" Daniel asked. "I didn't think they understood the technology well enough."

"I do not know. But I can see how it might be useful. Any force that arrived through the Stargate would be cut off, unable to retreat or to send back captives. The invaders lose control of their own communication, and are in danger of being abandoned to their fate. This could be turned to a great tactical advantage. The disadvantage, of course, is that they are limited to this world, and the single planet they are able to dial in spite of the self-inflicted sabotage." He raised an eyebrow at Sam.

She was frowning in abstraction. "The address for this planet, the one that the old man gave us on that memory stick – it was the _real_ address. Unscrambled."

Daniel winced. "So there's someone who knows about this planet, knows how to dial it. Someone from outside this set of worlds." He was drumming his fingers on the table. "The last time we were lured to a planet, it was a trap. The Jaffa with the bird helmets nearly got us. Teal'c didn't even know whose Jaffa they were. Unless you've figured something out since then?"

"I have not."

Sam nodded. "The old man wasn't one of the Ghabans – apart from everything else, the Ghabans don't know their own real Gate address. He does."

Daniel thoughtfully tapped his new neckring. It chimed softly. "And for some reason, he wanted us to come here."

- x -

Jack could be a very fast learner when he needed to be. He learned, very quickly, that the vehicle he'd stolen didn't so much fly as skim the ground. Any major surface irregularities translated into immediate turbulence – or, to put it another way, the thing bucked like a sonofabitch when he took it over large rocks and fallen trees. Still, it beat walking. Or sitting in an alien lock-up. Or getting shot.

Jack also figured out, quickly, that part of the skimmer's control display was a local grid map with a trackback feature. On a hunch, he followed the backtrace. He was also following a hunch, or a seat-of-the-pants gamble: guessing that the Goguryans would expect him to hare off into the bush, not follow their own backtrail. Guessing that he'd messed up the other skimmers badly enough that they wouldn't be able to follow him just yet. Guessing that he wasn't headed right bang into another pack of hostiles. He still had the unfamiliar weapon he'd snatched from Gaesum, although he'd had no time to try out the aim, or even try out exactly how it fired.

The hunch and the guesses paid off when he found a ring platform about twenty-five klicks from where Selmak had landed the ship. There was nobody hanging out nearby, but a cleared track led out from the platform clearing – nothing fancy, nothing like pavement, but the trees had been cut and enough of the underbrush and rocks cleared out to make it a good easy track for skimmers. The track headed up into the next ridge of the mountains, and Jack would've been willing to bet his next decent meal that it led to an active mine.

His stomach made a rude noise at the thought of his next decent meal. He muttered something rude at it in return. He found the ring controls, pressed a sequence at random, tried a new one when nothing happened. On his fifth attempt, he heard the faint hum that meant imminent activation. The ring controls were on a low pedestal, easy to activate from his seat on the skimmer; he nudged the throttle and glided onto the platform just before the ring stack emerged and flashed and rearranged the landscape around him.

When he'd entered the ring platform, the late morning sunlight had been off to his right and behind him – crap, was it really still the same morning of the same day? Well, no, not right here it wasn't. By the time the rings settled at his destination, the sun had blinked itself over to his left and plunged down to the horizon. Sunset, one of those violently intense sunsets, blood-red and flare-orange, the kind you got when there'd been volcanic activity or dust storms or really, really bad air pollution. The hills were a lot lower on that side, but right ahead of him was another range of mountains, humping up and blocking a big chunk of the sky. Another track led that way, probably to another mine – and _crap_, there were lights in that direction, bright yellow-white sparks winking to life as the dusk settled. The light wasn't torch or firelight, either. _Not_ savages, oh no. Too many lights. _There goes the neighborhood._

This wasn't the Gate area, so there must be multiple ring platforms in the system. _Selmak never thought to scan for anything really __advanced__, did he? Um, she. He. Whatever._ The backtracer on the skimmer was blank now, whatever that meant. Jack turned back to the ring controls and started punching new combinations. Lather, rinse, repeat. _ Meanwhile, in another part of the forest . . ._

This time, Jack's skimmer emerged from the settling rings into a blighted landscape. The sun was suddenly right bang overhead, baking hot. A dry valley between low bare hills, wide cracked flats where a once-muddy river had died a gasping death sometime in the past. The line of the hills was ragged, slashed with eroded gulleys, and the landscape was mottled in sickly grey and pale yellow. Jack remembered the view of the planet from space, and guessed that this time he was near the Gate complex. _Good. Getting somewhere._ He'd have to remember that combination on the ring system. He'd need to check out this locale more thoroughly, but not right now.

The backtracer on the skimmer display was active again, this time showing a path forward – the route back to the Gate itself? Made sense. Given how barren the countryside was here, it would be way too easy to go astray. The faint track he could see leading away from the ring platform was half-covered with blowing dust and dead bits of grassy stuff. _Crap._ The skimmer worried Jack. He couldn't do without it, but what were the odds that it had some kind of tracking gizmo? Hell, what were the odds that it _didn't_?

He could take the thing way out into the back country and dump it. That'd fox them. It would also leave him stranded in the wilds of an alien planet, with no way to get back home or retrieve Jacob. Nope, he'd have to keep hold of it. _Just gotta be a bit more foxy than the locals._ How advanced were they, anyhow? Probably no spaceships – _maybe_ no spaceships – Selmak _couldn't_ have missed a goddamned _spaceship_, after all.

Jack spun the skimmer around in a tight circle, grinning in spite of himself when he found out just how tight the turning radius was. _Sweet._ He scooted back to the ring platform. Once more for good luck, or good measure.

This time, the settling rings kicked up a puff of ice crystals around him. When a ring transport ended, it was always even odds whether you'd get a puff of wind in the face as the air pushed in at you, or an outwards breeze as the transported pocket of displaced atmosphere rushed out. This time, the hot, arid lowland air within the rings whuffed out at almost gale speed, and a breath of glacial ice crowded in on Jack's lungs. His bare fingers tingled in the sudden cold and he dug into a pocket for his gloves.

Around him, high mountains reared their heads, crowned with blinding white under bright late-afternoon sunlight. A dozen yards from the ring platform, conifers held up heavy loads of snow on bent branches. A faint track led away upslope from the rings: not much more than a clear gap between the trees, overgrown with easily-read signs of several seasons' neglect. He guessed it led to a played-out mine. _Perfect_.

Jack nudged the skimmer forward and faded into the trees.

- x -

Sam was sitting in the spacious central room in their guest quarters, waiting for Daniel to come back from having his ears talked off, for Teal'c to come back from prowling the alleys of Kumbi shaking down the kids for information, for the day to end, for something to happen that she could sink her teeth into. It was a hell of a lot harder being in command with nothing to do, no studies to make, no data to analyze. Well, that wasn't true; she did have work to do. She had the mathematical problem of the scrambled DHDs to solve. She had plant and mineral samples, a well-lit worktable, her laptop sitting ready with a fully charged battery, a full testing kit. But the only mineral sample that really mattered was the one she held in her hand, turning it between her fingers.

The afternoon sunlight from the broad window caught the polished surface of the Ghaban neckring Sam held. The surface was worked in a pattern of hammered dimples that glittered in the light. It looked almost like ordinary steel or silver, except for the sheen that was just a little warmer, and the feel of the metal in the hand. It was lightweight, feather-light, impossibly light. The Ghabans called the metal 'Sia-silver' – another reference to the Wagadou myth – and they'd been vague when she asked them where it came from. All she'd been able to learn was that there were processing facilities on Djenne – some of the commuters she'd watched the previous evening must have been coming from there. She'd asked if she could visit the place, and they'd arranged it promptly and cheerfully: a full VIP tour was all set up for the next day. Once there, she'd have to arrange to stay overnight, to get the stellar observations she'd need to work out Gate addresses. She hoped Djenne wasn't too industrialized – the last thing she needed now was to have to cope with major light pollution. Too damned many tiny things that might add up to the fiasco she was trying to avoid.

Her first command hadn't exactly been a fiasco – well, it had been, but she hadn't been blamed for it. Under normal circumstances, officers in the United States Air Force were expected to accomplish their missions without needing any excuses, but Stargate Command rarely operated under any circumstance that could be called 'normal'. Slack was cut, even for an experienced field officer who had failed to prevent a foothold situation from developing, when the foothold situation involved shapeshifting aliens masquerading as nature spirits. They'd lost that first source for trinium, or given it up; it had been the right thing to do, but it had hamstrung Earth's chances in the long fight.

If she could nail down a real source for trinium, a reliable source . . . it wouldn't solve all their problems. Earth would still be in danger of Goa'uld invasion, half the Stargates would still lead into hostile territory, they'd still be up against a galaxy full of races more technologically advanced, with no interest in sharing their discoveries or giving Earth a hand up the ladder. But they'd have a better chance. They could beef up their defenses, build a better iris for the Gate, make progress in a dozen different scientific fields. Dear god, they'd be able to contemplate an actual, full-fledged space program – start building their own ships and get out from under the growing need to beg rides from condescending half-assed allies.

All the half-formed dreams of her life, bounded in a circle of metal.

- x -

A long, thin finger of light from the rising sun stretched across a snowfield and poked in between the trunks of a thick copse of trees, finally blunting itself against the bare granite base of a cliff. The trees were crowded against it, huddled in the partial shelter of a mound of boulders and rubble that had fallen from higher ground and formed a rocky windbreak. A small cloud of birds hopped and chattered in the branches, hunting for food to stave off the cold. One flittered to the ground in front of a tall boulder, where the thin bright path of the sun reached into an overhang under the rocks. It chittered and hopped forward, drawn by a bright spark: the sun was reflecting off something that flared much brighter than any ice-crystal flash.

A loud squawk echoed off the cliff as a larger black bird wheeled in and chased the small bird away from the shiny prize, then hopped in to investigate the unknown bright object. An even louder squawk followed. Jack yanked the corner of the bright silver space blanket back into the shadow, swearing incoherently when his head banged against the rock ceiling of his shelter. The crow took flight, loudly protesting its outrage, and the flock of smaller birds scattered.

Jack couldn't turn around in the crack to crawl out head-first, so he wormed his way out into the icy brightness of the morning and stood up, still swearing, shaking out stiffened arms and legs and squinting into the sunrise.

He started to bundle up the space blanket, then stopped and made himself do it right, folding carefully and forcing the air out so it would go back into its original miniscule packet. Trinium, aluminum or whateverum, the thing had done its job and was priceless, as far as he was concerned.

He stopped swearing to spend a moment appreciating the universal nature of survival gear: there had been a surprisingly complete kit on the stolen skimmer, and most of the pieces had been easy to recognize. Parka, space blanket, headgear, emergency rations, a bottle with a clever little purifying filter built into it. Jack suspected one of the unidentifiable widgets might actually be a heat source, but he hadn't been willing to risk it the previous night. It could just as easily have been an emergency beacon, which would have screwed up his little campout real fast. The heat-capturing blanket had spared him the full-blown rustic routine with pine boughs and fir needles, and he'd had a reasonably comfortable night. He'd had lousy dreams, but at least nobody had interrupted them. Just as well.

The birds had moved to the next cluster of trees and resumed their chatter, familiar and just a bit unfamiliar. He caught a glimpse of them: little fluffed-up brown balls of feathers, probably only a bit different from Earth. The crow had looked just like any other crow. Jack looked up at the trees, which looked familiar, as usual.

If Carter was here, she'd be talking about chlorophyll and photosynthesis and universal constants of plant biology and stuff like that. If Daniel was here, he'd be talking about the Goa'uld being consistent about what kind of planets they liked. If Teal'c was here – well, if Teal'c was here, he wouldn't be talking at all, except maybe to indicate that they ought to get moving. Teal'c would be right.

It took Jack ten minutes to hike back to the area where he'd stashed the skimmer, and a long, slow, cautious hour of careful approach and patient surveillance before he actually retrieved it. But it looked like the scheme had worked: if the Goguryans had any way of tracking the thing at a distance, they weren't quite good enough to spot it, or him, thorugh a few hundred feet of rock topped with ice. He hadn't risked spending the night in the abandoned mine tunnels himself, not when there was a chance that the skimmer would be traced, but it had given him a great parking spot.

Just at the moment, his gut was telling him that he wasn't being watched or followed. Hopefully his gut was correct, and not simply lulled into complacency by the surprisingly edible strips of dried compressed whatsit that he'd had for breakfast. It also told him that he _would_ be tracked, eventually. It usually went that way, back and forth. But today, he planned on getting his chance to change the balance.

He needed to find the central settlement, without being found himself in the process. Wherever the locals had managed to sustain a technological civilization. They'd have Jacob there. Assuming he wasn't dead – but Jack's gut said the old coot was still alive, and pissed as hell. He would start with the Gate complex, which ought to be interesting at least. Of course, there was that old saying about what the Chinese meant by 'interesting'. From a Chinese point of view, Jack's life had always been interesting.

Actually, he'd start by finding his way back to the transport rings, if he could, without getting lost or going in circles. He'd picked up a handy trick some years back from a group of Norwegian SFs, and it was even more useful off-planet than it had been on Earth: if the landscape was unfamiliar, you damned well made it familiar ASAP, using whatever mental tricks or shortcuts you needed. Jack checked the bearings he'd taken the previous night: the rocky spire of the Setesh Guard's Nose over to the south, and the fine bald granite crown of Hammond's Dome. He slid the skimmer into a smooth glide over the first snowfield on the way back towards the ring platform.

Once clear of the mineshaft, Jack finally took a few minutes to do something he'd wanted to do from the start: really push the thing full throttle, ram it through a series of tight turns and maneuvers, get a proper feel for what it could do. It could do plenty, it turned out.

The main stabilizer was integrated into the body of the skimmer and responded to shifts of body weight, while the left handgrip allowed the rider to dial the stabilizer up or down. Turning it way up helped with the turbulence problem, although that cost big in speed and momentum. Turning it way down was probably something that the owner's manual would have told him not to do, if he'd had an owner's manual, and been able to read it.

After a little marginally crazy experimentation with the stabilizer control, the throttle and the brake in combination, Jack found he could actually get the skimmer to pop into the air a good three or four feet. The landing was tooth-jarring even on a snowfield, but Jack's glee at the antigrav wheelie warmed him to his toes.

Sweet, sweet ride. Not quite a naquedah-powered flying motorcycle, but close enough. It would've made a _great_ Christmas present for Carter. The Gorgons might be a bit rough with strangers when you first met them, but if you were looking for equipment to steal, they sure had a great product line.

It was another thing he seemed to have in common with the Goguryans, in addition to a healthy appreciation of well-made survival gear and not really liking the Tok'ra. Shame about that. If things hadn't started out so badly, that could've been a nice thing to have in common. They'd blown their chance at the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

- x -

"Well, I guess that answers that question," said Sam.

"Indeed."

They were standing in front of the Gate on Djenne, looking around the – how was she going to describe it in her report? Debarkation complex? Shooting gallery? Barrel, carefully and specifically designed for the highly efficient shooting of fish? The Gate was set on a stone block platform at the end of a narrow canyon, made narrower by masonry. Ahead of them, the rails that guided the Ghabans' freight carts ran down a ramp and between high rock walls, with enough room on each side for moderate foot traffic, but not quite enough for the wings of a Death Glider. About a hundred yards ahead, the rails began to climb a gentle slope up to ground level, and she could see what looked like a massive pulley and crane system for lifting heavy freight in and out. The rim of the canyon was topped on both sides with thick walls, about man-height, generously provided with firing apertures. There was plenty of local vegetation – this part of the planet seemed to have a mild climate and fertile soil – but it had been cleared well back from the cliff edges topside, and only a few scrubby bushes and weeds grew in the canyon itself. There was no cover for anything larger than a medium-sized beetle.

She craned her neck to see past Teal'c, checking how the DHD was situated. He was examining the layout minutely, probably imagining what it would be like to defend this world from invasion through the Gate – or to have to try to reach the Gate and escape the planet in the face of armed opposition. Heaven and Hell, from a tactical point of view. There was the DHD, on a pedestal near the Gate reached by a short flight of steps. There must be at least three shooting slots nicely lined up to cover it, and the stairs would slow down anyone trying to dial and run, and the scrambled glyphs meant that nobody could dial out and escape the planet without a delay that would give the residents ample time to muster.

"They knew just what they were doing when they scrambled their DHDs."

"They did."

Sam remembered the Gate on P6H-283, the fubar'd mission that had led to this one, and the Jaffa Bird Squad they'd been able to pick off in the partially enclosed arena there. Under Jack O'Neill's leadership, they'd been able to exploit the tactical advantages of the ground there and return home safely in spite of the enemy's superior numbers.

_If only the Colonel could see this. He'd either love it or hate it. Or both._

"O'Neill should see this. He would be most impressed."

_Indeed,_ Sam thought.

- x -

_Okay, Sokar, old buddy. Was this your idea?_

Jack stared down into the blind canyon where the Goguryan Stargate was located. It was interesting, all right – in the bad way. The Chinese way. He'd never seen a worse killing ground. Or a better one, if you could manage to be on the right side of the shooting.

_Were you making sure the other Goa'uld didn't get the drop on you? Worried about other System Lords coming to poach on your turf?_ No. Jack wasn't buying that one, not even from himself. Based on the little Teal'c had reluctantly divulged, Sokar was pure old-school snake – nastier and more puffed up with badassitude than most, but not really different. Not subtle. Not _sneaky_. Not – _devious_.

_I don't think it was you, old Soak. I bet this is something the kids put together once you were out of the house. A little surprise in case you came back unexpectedly. Or at all._

It was another proof that the plague was no longer a threat. And the Goguryans knew it was history – otherwise they'd be able to just dig in somewhere and wait for any stray snakes to keel over and die on their own. How long ago had the bug burnt out?

Jack studied the walls – concrete and masonry, solidly built, a higher level of technology than it looked at first glance. Daniel wasn't here, damn it. If he'd been here, he might be able to guess how long ago it had all been built, how many decades or centuries of sun and windblown sand in this hell-hole of a desert would weather the structures to that degree, polishing and dulling the sharp edges of the rocks. All Jack knew was that the local state of siegecraft was well-grounded, in more than one way. The canyon walls were topped with fortifications on both sides, riddled with firing slits. The DHD was carefully placed on a raised, exposed pedestal, and anyone trying to dial out would be a sitting duck in a shooting gallery. _A squad of Cub Scouts with bows and arrows could defend the whole damned planet._

Which meant that the locals didn't just want to prevent invasion; they also intended that nobody rude enough to drop in unannounced would be able to leave. As long as nobody ever left, the Goa'uld would never know the plague was gone. Sweet.

_You can check out anytime you like . . . _

Jack turned his skimmer back towards the ring platform. He wasn't ready to leave anyway. Not when that meant leaving Jacob behind.

- x -

Daniel had been feeling increasingly comfortable in the hall with the storytellers, in that wonderful state where he could be both fascinated and relaxed at the same time. He'd been able to let go of the diplomatic mask and simply enjoy what he was hearing, leaning forward and beaming at each speaker, letting the delight shine through as his mind hummed along at double speed, noting and cataloguing nuances. They were in the Great Hall today: when the Great Tale was performed, it was a major civic event, presided over by the current _Bur_ of the Gbara, a husband-and-wife team named Fasseke and Mounass. Most of the population of Kumbi that wasn't at work were crowded into the hall.

"The Children of Anansi heard and obeyed. One by one, each clan was given the secret: Anansi gave our ancestors the key, and the slaves stole themselves from the masters. He sent us to the sacred land, the Blessed Grove, to Paradise, and Wagadou-Bida knew not where we had gone, but raged in vain. But this was only the beginning."

Balla's wife, Ababuo, had been telling the tale with him, speaking in counterpoint. It was obvious that they'd been telling this story, in this manner, for years; apparently the tale belonged to their clan in some way, and telling it was something of a cross between a civic duty and a sacred rite.

Now Daniel blinked, made a mental leap sideways. The mask snapped back into place: his face didn't change, but behind it his mind ratcheted up into an even higher gear. Outwardly, he listened with intent appreciation; inwardly, he gaped in half-panic. _Whaaat?_ He squashed the impulse to stop Balla in mid-sentence, drag him off to the Gate and through it to Djenne, so Sam and Teal'c could hear this firsthand.

"What of our brothers and sisters in bondage? What of the miserable slaves of the mines of Gogwario, joined to us across the stars by the yoke of the Demon-Snakes?" Ababuo had an almost preternatural gift of subtle mimicry; she let her shoulders slump a fraction, and everyone in the room felt a crushing burden on their backs. Daniel rubbed his neck as if he could feel an ache. "Anansi willed that we should not forget them in our joy, in our freedom: our first task, even before we planted our crops and built our huts, must be their succor. Even unseen, they were our kindred. Their clans and ours were bound together. And in the sanctuary of Ghaba, we found freedom for Gogwario."

Ababuo reached up to strip leaves off an invisible bush, stooped to dig up invisible roots. Balla beamed at her and took up the tale. "Here, in the soil and seed of Ghaba, we found the answer. Freedom for our clan-kin. Death for the demon-snakes and all their kin! Death to their servants! It was the death of Anansi: cunning and clever, hidden and secret, mistaken and misunderstood. The demon-snakes believed that the world had turned against them, cursing them with plague and sickness. Hah! Our ancestors were cunning and careful: the Children of Anansi laid their snares well. The demons and their servants fled or died, cursing Gogwario in their fear and agony. No demon-snake has set foot on Gogwario since that day."

_The plague. The planet Jacob was talking about – Sam figured it was in this same region of space, it was part of Sokar's empire, it's __got__ to be the same one – there never __was__ a plague. It was poison. They found a biopharmaceutical poison that kills symbiotes._

His attention snapped back into focus. Ababuo had shifted into her coda, wrapping up this section of the Tale and throwing out teasers of what the next section would be about. _If we do get them hooked on TV shows, they'll be all over the gimmick of previews from next week's episode._

"By the will of Anansi, Ghaba was hidden and Gogwario was free. But what of Djenne? What of the mother-world, the first nest, the bright hearth and the forge? The Web could not be complete without all its threads! It was the time of the dance of the stars, when the Spider's Daughters watched the heavens and carried the weight of our shared destiny. Today I have woken him up, I have sung the song of the Children."

"Today I have woken him up, I have sung the song of the Sons of Anansi," Balla chanted in reply.

"Tomorrow I am waking him up. Tomorrow I shall sing of the Spider's Daughters. Tonight he sleeps. Tonight we sleep."

_Tonight I don't get any sleep unless I can get through to Sam._

As soon as he could manage a hasty departure without being offensive, Daniel left the Great Hall and ran through the cobbled streets towards the Stargate. His mind raced faster than his feet. _No way this is all coincidence. The planets are linked, damn it, the __missions__ are linked . . . _He ran short of wind and had to slow down to a huffing trot. _The old man handed us the address – the __real__ address – right about the same time the Tok'ra learned the location of the other planet. That has to be Gogwario. The old man wasn't Asian or African. He's got to be from outside this set of planets._

SG-1 had been on that market world because the first recon team to visit had found small amounts of trinium being traded, used both as currency and as a commodity. _So somebody out there knows about this place already, and somebody's getting hold of the trinium without the people here knowing about it. Do the Goa'uld know? Is this another trap? It doesn't feel like the Goa'uld – it's too fancy, too subtle . . . got to talk to Sam. We've got to get word to Jack somehow._

Daniel broke into a run again.

He was gasping before he got close, but he had to slow down anyway. The last block was filled with a milling, chattering crowd, a hubbub of voices raised in anxious busy speech. The end of the block was blocked by a row of guards – Daniel's racing pulse rammed into hammering overdrive for a moment when he saw marks on the foreheads of the tall, muscular men, then eased slightly when he saw that some of the marks were partly faded. _Amadou. Local militia. Not Jaffa._

As he approached the line, the biggest and heftiest one, a man with dark walnut skin and muscles that almost reached Teal'c's level, looked swiftly from Daniel's face to his neck and back to meet his eyes again. The guard was wearing a set of three neckrings, thin slips of bright trinium, but he stepped aside and bowed his head slightly as Daniel passed through the cordon.

In the square, Daniel could see Fasseke and Mounass and the other members of the Gbara huddled in a group, talking anxiously, but he hardly glanced at them.

The Stargate was gone.

As he stared and gasped for breath, Balla came up through the cordon behind him, his robes askew. Mounass saw them both and hurried over. Her face was clouded with rage and she was spluttering.

"May the Gwaldé chew their souls! May Wagadou-Bida spit them out! Stupid fools! We _told _ them the time of prophecy was past! Did not Anansi tell them himself? You told them yourself, Balla! Why did the fools not listen?"

"Whoa! Whoa!" Daniel managed to find enough breath to speak, but could hardly think of what to ask. "What? Who?"

"The Spider's Daughters!"

"_What?_" Daniel felt his eyes crossing with the effort to breathe deeply. "The Gate – you mean the Daughters of Anansi stole the Gate? Not the Goa'uld?"

"I will choke them if I catch them! I will!"

_Can I get in line? _Daniel thought.

- x - x - x -_  
_


	5. Five

_**Spider's Web**_

_**Five**_

- x -

_A Stargate is 8 meters in diameter and weighs 32 tons. It's a big, heavy object._

_The following big, heavy objects have been successfully moved by cultures possessing technology no more advanced than the wheel, the ramp and the lever: the moai of Easter Island; the dolmens of Stonehenge, Brittany and Gochang; the megaliths of Machu Picchu, Baalbek, Quiriguá, Mycenae, Axum and Karnak, not to mention St. Petersburg and Jerusalem._

_I could go on, but I've made my point. Technology makes people lazy. With all due respect to Major Smithfield and Dr. Horn at Area 51, the suggestion that moving a Stargate is beyond the technical ability and physical capacity of any of the so-called 'primitive' slave cultures in the Goa'uld sphere of influence is nothing more than the arrogance of a typical modern jarhead who believes that advanced technology conveys some actual fundamental superiority. It's the kind of shortsighted idiocy you'd expect from a Goa'uld._

– _Daniel Jackson, private journal_

- x -

Jack lay flat on the bleached, gritty sand and glowered down at the tumble of buildings below him. He'd managed to get the skimmer up the more gradual backslope of this hill, a pale, flabby prominence that he'd dubbed Kinsey's Ass. On this side, the weathered rocks fell away in a steep scree. The morning was halfway gone already and he'd only caught glimpses of movement in the complex below him. It was harder than he'd expected to figure out which parts of the complex were still in use, let alone what kind of use that might be. The longer he looked, the more convinced he was that the difficulty was no accident.

He had guessed – hoped – no, guessed – that the Goguryans might have Jacob somewhere around here, the main complex nearest the shooting gallery they'd set up around their Stargate. But the place seemed to be a ghost town – kind of like what searchers might've found if the _Marie Celeste_ had been a skanky factory in some dreary corner of Soviet Russia, only not as cheerful. The buildings were mostly crumbling shells: Goa'uld construction, graceless and ugly even when new, now a crouching eyesore to match the blighted landscape. The thoroughfares between the buildings were broad and flat, suitable for hauling heavy loads of ore. Jack thought he saw signs of recent traffic, but he couldn't be certain. The skimmers didn't leave tracks, after all. He finally selected an approach route, more by wild-assed guess than by science.

He was almost to the first stretch of buildings when the backtrace on the skimmer reactivated. This time, a little red bead of light flashed and blinked next to the display screen.

_Crap!_

Time to ditch the thing, or stash it at least. Jack threw the throttle wide open and careened in through the gaping open doorway of a great multistoried concrete hulk. The first open space looked like some kind of loading dock. One entire wall was lined with big-assed bins, probably for unprocessed ore. Jack sized up the room in one moment and made his decision in the next: he aimed the skimmer straight at the row of bins without slowing down. Just before he plowed into them, he hit the brakes and stabilizer control and shimmied the throttle, and the skimmer did its hair-raising flying wheelie maneuver and popped into the air. The rear fairing only just cleared the edge of the bin, but he made it. He wrenched the skimmer sideways to a stop and sat, panting for a precious moment, before he clambered up onto the seat and scrambled out of the bin again.

There was plenty of light in the loading bay, but once Jack had plunged into a likely-looking corridor and taken a few turns, the ambient light pinched out to a bare glimmer. He stopped to let his eyes adjust, and heard echoes of sounds behind him. _The good news is, you were right about that damned blinking light. The bad news is, they're after you._

Within ten minutes, Jack's head was aching with the strain of remembering the route he was taking. After the first turn, he'd started unwinding a mental ball of string, but he had to cut across his own backtrail at one point to dodge one group of searchers, and it got a lot harder after that. He found a narrower corridor that he figured had to be the local equivalent of a service access passage, and started hunting for a vertical. The building was multistoried, but if the locals didn't live or work in it, they might not think of looking _up_.

He hit pay dirt, an air shaft that apparently serviced part of the processing system, with a rail ladder leading up toward a gantry three stories up. He hauled himself up, swearing mentally at his knees. His boots knocked dust off the steps of the ladder as he climbed, trying to step as lightly as he could while still hauling ass. He could still hear some of the sounds of the searchers – there were at least three groups, and from what he could hear they were quartering the building methodically, but they hadn't expanded past the first floor.

Two-thirds of the way to the top, the climb broke at a landing, and a catwalk snaked around the airshaft and led to a doorway on an upper level. _That oughta do it._ Jack slipped through and made sure the door didn't bang shut behind him.

There had been a fair amount of light in the airshaft, and this upper room was much darker and stuffier. Jack squeezed his eyes tight shut for a moment, then opened them quickly. That trick usually worked when he needed to get his night sight adjusted fast.

The effort was a total waste. Even as he opened his eyes, a light flared directly in front of him. Details leaped out in the dimness: the lamp, the business end of a weapon trained on him, the satisfied expression on the face of the man who was holding both. A familiar face: one of the band who'd formed the unwelcoming committee the day before. Pang, Jack thought, or maybe Pong.

"About time you showed up, 'dude'." Pang's voice was almost a drawl. "I was beginning to wonder if you were all that sparky-headed after all."

- x -

Sam couldn't fault the hospitality they received on Djenne. She wished she hadn't been so preoccupied with the appalling, intriguing prospect of the scrambled DHDs. Daniel should have been with them, making notes about indigenous adaptation following liberation. But he was badly needed right where he was, teasing out the secrets of the Ghaban rebellion or escape or whatever it had taken for them to free themselves from Goa'uld enslavement.

The ugliness of the past, with its desperate memories of slavery and exploitation, were pretty much everywhere you looked on Djenne. The old trinium processing facilities were still there, and still stood as the largest structures in the colonized area near the Stargate: huge empty shells of buildings, vacant and crumbling. The work had been labor-intensive and dirty, using the same level of basic, almost medieval technology that was all the Goa'uld generally permitted to human slave populations.

After liberation, the Ghabans had abandoned the old factories, but continued the trinium refinement in workspaces better suited to their own preferences: the area around the Gate was dotted with big courtyards surrounded by open thatched sheds, with irrigation ditches running through the center. Trinium processing took a lot of water.

Kadijatu was proudly pointing out the rain catchment system that drained from the roofs of the old buildings into massive cisterns. The climate in this part of Djenne was temperate, much cooler and rainier than the settled part of Ghaba, and the rain cisterns mean less drain on the rivers. In the decades since the Goa'uld had left, herds of game animals had returned to the surrounding countryside. "The tale is told that under the Gwaldé, our people used to cleanse the _Sia_-silver in a way that fouled the waters downstream. The grass withered and the beasts fled or died. We no longer do it that way."

"Did, um, Anansi teach you the new method?" Sam asked. Daniel still hadn't worked out whether Anansi had been an actual hero of the Ghaban liberation or a mythical figure, although his enthusiastic monologue on the subject had gone on for over an hour the previous evening.

Kadijatu shrugged noncommittally. "This method takes longer. It is easier and cleaner, although we have less at the end of each day to show for our work. But what of that? There is always another day tomorrow. As long as we continue to work, we have enough."

Teal'c bowed his head fractionally. "Your people are wise if they can recognize how much is enough."

The old woman scrunched up her face and hooted with laughter. "Hah! Wisdom! The tale is told of a greedy boy who thrust his hand into a jar and seized a fine fat fistful of nuts. He wished to eat them all."

"I know that story," Sam said. "The mouth of the jar was narrow, and he couldn't get his hand out without opening his fist and letting go of some of the nuts."

Kadijatu opened her eyes wide and beamed. "You know this tale? Your people have this one?"

"Yes. On our world, it's attributed to a man named Aesop. Except in his version, it wasn't a boy, it was an animal we call a monkey. Most of Aesop's stories had animals instead of people in them, such as crows or donkeys."

An airy wave from Kadijatu dismissed Aesop and his menagerie. "No donkey is as foolish or stubborn as a boy. No crow is as clever and stupid as a man. On your world, what happened to this 'mon-kee'?"

"I'm not sure. I think he was just stuck. How does your story end?"

Kadijatu thrust out her hand, reached into an imaginary jar and grasped a handful of air. Some trick of her face and gestures made the jar and the nuts seem almost visible. She scowled, the wrinkles on her face deepening into crevasses, and tugged and pulled at her hand in vain. She suddenly looked up from her dilemma and met first Sam's eyes and then Teal'c's, her own dark eyes glinting. "There are different forms of the tale. In one, the boy stands in helpless anger until he starves with his hand full of food. In another, he thrashes around and breaks the jar, and the sharp edges cut his hand to the bone. In another, he struggles and curses, and the Gwaldé lord who owns the jar hears him and comes to see. The greedy boy is caught by the Demon-Snake."

"And killed?" asked Sam. She felt Teal'c stir and suddenly knew that was the wrong conclusion.

"No. The Gwaldé lord sees the boy's greed, laughs, and says, 'Very good! This I understand!' He lays his hand on the helpless, foolish boy, and draws the soul out of his body and gives him over to the demons of his house. The boy becomes a Demon-Snake himself and knows only greed thereafter."

_Tough luck, Aesop,_ Sam thought. _You just got your ass kicked._

- x -

"The _fools!_ Stupid, greedy donkeys! Did we learn _nothing_ from the Gwaldé? Must those greedy fools make us repeat the simplest lessons?"

Mounass was storming up and down the Little Hall. She was in her early forties, tall and long-legged and energetic, and Daniel felt a little dizzy from watching her. Fasseke was shorter than his wife and co-ruler, considerably older, far more phlegmatic and laconic, and Daniel hadn't yet figured out which of them was actually higher status. They both wore too many neckrings for easy counting, and their approach to leadership seemed to involve the exchange of half a dozen words, after which Fasseke would remain stolidly in place while Mounass went off in all directions, issuing tsunamis of orders and instructions. She was always obeyed quickly, and Daniel hadn't seen anyone checking in with Fasseke first.

Unfortunately, Daniel couldn't make anything out of the impassioned flood of words. He tried to get a question in sideways. "The Daughters of Anansi – are they, um, priestesses? You haven't mentioned any temples to him or anything – "

"Priestesses? Temples?" Mounass stopped in mid-tirade and stared at him as if he'd sprouted tentacles. "Anansi is not Gwaldé! He _taught_ us, opened our eyes, warned us against the lies of those who call themselves gods. He would _never_ permit worship! He would think it – "

"Most likely he would think it a great joke," Fasseke interrupted. His face was impassive, but his eyes gleamed.

Mounass glowered at him, then her mouth twisted and gradually cracked into a sardonic smile. "Yes, yes, he would. He would laugh at my anger and ask me what I intended to do now."

"And he would examine the floor to see if it was worn thin yet," Fasseke added. "Is it? No? Then we still have work to do."

"And that would be . . . ?" Daniel prompted.

"We must recover the Sky-Ring. We cannot wait. We must find where the Spider's Daughters have hidden it this time."

" '_This time_'?!" Daniel felt himself winding up, ready to explode, and made himself take a deep breath. The information was there, the people were willing to talk, he just needed to get them onto the right subject. He needed to figure out what the hell the right subject was. And stay patient while they rang the changes on him. "_Mounass_. Who are the 'Spider's Daughters', and why did they steal the Stargate – the Sky-Ring?"

She shook her head and scowled. "I am not a _griot_. Go ask Balla and Ababuo."

"I was hoping I could get an answer in less than a week," Daniel blurted. He winced at himself. "I mean, I'm sorry, I know they're master tellers, and that's important, but it takes a really long time the way they do it – " He had to stop trying to speak. Fasseke was doubled up with laughter and wasn't listening to a word of it. Mounass was trying to hide her smile, but the warmth had reached her eyes: the first warmth or ease Daniel had seen in her face since the Stargate had disappeared.

She looked at Fasseke and finally caught his eyes when he paused in his laughter. He nodded. "Yes, yes. You go," he said softly. It was an agreement, not a command. He flicked his fingers and watched her leave the room like an advancing storm front. She'd made the Little Hall feel cramped; now it felt vast and echoing, empty save for dust motes. Daniel fought the urge to sneeze, and won. Fasseke flicked his fingers again, gently, and Daniel sat down beside him, making himself relax into the quietness around them.

"The Spider's Daughters." The older man's words were soft, but clear. "Once, all our people attended to their every word, listened and waited. Once, three worlds held their breath to hear the Daughters speak. Is this not a fearful charge? It is a burden that, once laid down, the soul longs to take up again."

_Three__ worlds?_ Daniel made a mental note, but didn't dare introduce a new topic. _Later._ "You say they were not priestesses, father. But they were leaders? And they no longer hold any power . . . ?"

"The Daughters were given the secret, and the duty. The dance of the stars . . . "

" . . . 'when the Spider's Daughters watched the heavens'," Daniel recited, trying to recall the words that had ended the evening's telling, " 'and carried the weight of our shared destiny.'"

He felt a spark of pride at getting it right, and saw the glint of approval in the _Bur_'s eyes. With luck, it might nudge the old man's storytelling forward a bit faster. Or it might send him off into more of the obscure-flowery-and-vague stuff.

"It was hard, so hard, to wait out the long months and years when the worlds were asunder. Only when Sokar fell into defeat did it end, and we could move forward."

Daniel's throat suddenly constricted as if he was back in prison with a hairy hand squeezing his neck. _Bad news, bad news. God, I hate bringing the bad news._ He cleared his throat. "Clan-father, I hate to have to tell you this – but Sokar lives still. He has returned to power. He is once again reaching out to claim his old empire."

"Yes, yes, we know this."

Daniel stared at him, flummoxed. "You do?"

- x -

Jack recognized the weapon that was trained on him: the same kind they'd used the day before to blow the nasty bleeding holes in Jacob. Pang's expression was a bit harder to identify, and not because of any tired BS about Oriental inscrutability. The Koreans he'd known on Earth were plenty scrutable, especially after a few beers.

"Just to let you know – some of my people are posted at the bottom of that airshaft by now. So do us both a favor and we can just stay put for a bit?"

Jack pulled a face that would've had Hammond on full glower, except he would never have pulled that expression on the general. "Okay."

The tone had been grudging, but Pang nodded in what looked like satisfaction. "You've still got the weapon you took. How about putting it on the floor?"

Jack made another face, carefully pulled the alien gun out of his waistband, set it down and nudged it towards the other man with his foot. Pang stepped forward without taking his eyes off Jack, reached out with a foot, hooked the gun and kicked it into the dark corner behind him, then stepped back again, well out of range of any stupid heroics. Jack smiled faintly. _Good moves._

Much to Jack's surprise, Pang nodded again and holstered his own weapon. He rubbed his nose and studied Jack thoughtfully.

"You got a name?"

"Jack O'Neill, Colonel, United States Air Force, serial number – aw, forget it. I'm O'Neill. How 'bout you?" If the guy answered 'Pang', Jack was going to lose it.

Instead, he placed one palm against his chest and replied, "Kyeong."

_Better than Pang, anyway. Or Ping. Or even Park._

Kyeong hunkered down and set the light on the floor. He looked annoyingly relaxed – like most of Asia and Africa, the Koreans hadn't gone in for chairs much until recently, and it figured that their offworld cousins here hadn't lost the ability to squat in comfort for long periods. Jack did the same, blessing whichever ancestors had passed down the same ability to him. His knees weren't happy about the position, but at least he could stay like this and not fall over after two or three minutes. Carter and Daniel weren't so lucky.

Apparently Kyeong followed the same diplomatic philosophy that Cheul had: he produced a bottle, drank, replaced the cap and tossed the bottle to Jack. "You left your supplies behind when you ditched the flitter."

"I was in a hurry." Jack drank without demur. "Thanks."

"Quite a climb after all that. Dusty, too."

Jack nodded and drank again.

"Onee – O-Neeyul." Kyeong frowned over the name. "You're one of the Taur'i, aren't you?"

"What if I am?"

"The tale is a band of Taur'i warriors – a small band, the _same_ band – defied and defeated Apophis no less than three times. The tale is that but for the Taur'i, Apophis' rule would not have gone into decline. He would not have been crushed by Sokar."

"Yeah, we kicked his snaky ass. You want me to say we're sorry?"

Kyeong snorted. "Apophis is dead, they say. _Ra_ is dead – Ra, the implacable, the eternal, whose empire was to have outlasted time itself."

"Y'know, for a planet that's been off the grid for a couple of hundred years, you dudes sure are up on the latest gossip from the galactic grapevine."

Most of Jack's remark should have been meaningless gibberish, but from the glint in Kyeong's eyes, he understood the intent. "You ever run out of sparkytalk?"

"No way, Jose." Jack decided his knees had had enough of the squatting business, and settled himself into a sitting position. Muchbetter. "I got a black belt in smartassitude."

Kyeong's eyes glinted again. " 'Smartassitude'. Is that what you used on Apophis?"

"You betcha. That and some high explosives, a few primitive automatic projectile weapons, a metric buttload of attitude . . . that kinda thing. I suppose you folks are gonna be pissed off about the mess we've made out there?" He waggled his fingers in the general direction of the galaxy.

"Mess?"

"Yeah. You know. Killing System Lords, blowing stuff up, freeing planets – that kinda thing."

Kyeong's teeth flashed. " 'No way, Jose'." He dug in his pocket for something wrapped in leaves, peeled one end bare, took a bite and tossed the rest to Jack. The cylindrical lump of mashed pressed gunk tasted a little like peanuts and a little like salted dirt, but Jack ate it anyway.

"Nice to hear that," Jack said around a mouthful. "The Tok'ra sure are pissed off about it."

"So. Your worm-ridden friend – " Kyeong was looking carefully at Jack's face as he spoke. "You say he's Tok'ra and not _Goartu_ – not Goh-ah-uld."

"What, you thought I was kidding?"

"Maybe he's not such a friend, eh? You didn't seem like close friends."

Jack gave an exasperated shrug. "Okay, no. He wasn't exactly my best buddy, even before he got hitched up with a snake. He wasn't even my CO."

Kyeong looked blankly confused. "Seeyo?"

Jack rubbed one hand over his eyes. Cultural exchange was Daniel's gig, and this was no time for vocabulary lessons, and anything Jack could personally do to prevent the insidious spread of acronyms across the galaxy ought to go onto his all-too-short list of lifetime good deeds, shouldn't it? "Never mind. Anyway, maybe the Tok'ra _are_ a little bit, well . . . they're Tok'ra. But they're not Goa'uld. If you can't count on anything else, at least you can count on that. How's he doing, anyway? Jacob?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, your buddies _did_ shoot him!"

Kyeong shrugged, unconcerned. "It takes more than that to kill the worm-bitten. He'll be fine."

"You speaking from a whole lotta experience there?"

"I'm no slaghead. Neither are you, I figure."

Jack took another pull from the bottle. "So where've you got him? Somewhere around here?"

"No. He's been moved. To a safer place."

"Safer? Safe from what?"

Kyeong didn't answer and Jack lost track of the question. They had both heard it at the same time: a distant vibration high above, a series of dull, heavy thumps, then a much heavier, closer thump. Much too close. The building shuddered and the dust rose in puffs. Kyeong caught himself before he lost his balance; Jack was glad he was already sitting down.

On the far side of the door behind Jack, booted feet could be heard, metallic clanking echoes, coming closer. Someone was climbing up the ladder in the airshaft.

"Son of a _bitch_."

- x -

Djenne and Ghaba had similar rotation periods, but no two planets ever had days of identical length. At present, Kumbi was several hours behind the local time at the main settlement on Djenne. Local night fell only a few hours after Sam and Teal'c's arrival, giving Sam a nice early start for her observations.

They'd given her access to the roof of one of the older buildings, now unused, off on the edge of the complex, well away from the areas where the Ghabans used lights after nightfall. There was minimal light pollution in any case: Djenne didn't seem to have much of a permanent population, and most of the usual crowd of workers hadn't been around that day. Apparently the day's main storytelling event back on Ghaba was important enough to mean a general holiday. Sam remembered that Daniel had been particularly excited about it.

She was getting the telescope set up, arranging a place for the laptop, contriving a spot where she could keep notes with just enough illumination from a carefully shaded light. Teal'c was off making a thorough survey of the area and trying to determine if anyone on Djenne had ever actually defended the Gate in any kind of fight.

Kadijatu had already retired for the night. "It is always good to visit Djenne when the night comes early like this. I can go to my bed early and none of the young people think it weak or lazy." She had laughed. "It is much worse when the day and night are opposite! During those times, I send someone younger. I am too old. It tires me. But you must have someone to help you in your work. Young people are good for this. They need to be good for something!"

She'd left Sam to the earnest attentions of a young woman in her early twenties, who had joined Kadijatu's entourage early in the tour. The young woman had caught Sam's attention from the start: like some of the children Teal'c had met the day before, her ancestry was clearly partly Asian. Her skin was lighter and more golden than the others, and she had Asian eyelids and killer cheekbones. She wore two very slender neckrings of twisted trinium wire, the youngest person Sam had seen wearing a double ring. She seemed almost painfully shy, but she'd been obviously delighted when Kadijatu had picked her out to attend to Sam.

"This is Astou. She is very clever. She will ask you many questions. Do not answer her questions if they are stupid."

"Our people believe that there are no stupid questions."

Kadijatu scowled fiercely. "That is the first stupid thing I have heard you say, Sam-Carter."

As soon as Kadijatu had left, the girl's shyness evaporated. Sam had been trying to think how to draw her out, but it proved completely unnecessary. The deluge of questions didn't come immediately: Astou watched Sam first, observing her work and examining the equipment, and only started to ask questions after she'd taken stock. Sam had time to show her the Arabic numeral system and get a demonstration of Ghaban mathematical symbols and notation before the trickle of inquiry turned into a true flood. She was amazed at the laptop without being awed by it, and stood in openmouthed nerdy rapture when Sam showed her a spreadsheet.

"This will calculate for you? And keep all the numbers, so they can be examined later? And all the work?" Her eyes shone.

Sam grinned and shook her head. "You're not kidding, are you? You really get it."

Astou shrugged. "Mathematics is something that women do. Is it not so on your world?"

"No, not really. Actually, not at all."

Astou looked uncertain. "Oh, men can do it too, but they mostly use it only for basic things. Enough to keep records. My –" she coughed, "Um, Lansana has to keep many records for his work, but he always has to scratch all his figures out on a piece of bark before he writes them in his records. He is afraid of writing the wrong thing. He is very, very careful, poor boy." Her eyes shone with love and admiration, and Sam swallowed a grin. Some things really didn't change from one planet to another.

And some things didn't change even when you expected them to. Astou already used decimal numbers and understood the concept of the zero. Sam tried to remember enough of her math history to figure out just what that implied. She wished Daniel was here. _Daniel thinks the Ghabans were taken from Earth – sub-Saharan Africa – between 400 and 800 AD. That's too early for their ancestors to have had it._ _It would've reached their part of the world with Islamic scholarship and science . . ._ It was like the trinium. Where the hell had it come from? _But look at Astou, not to mention that half-Asian kid Teal'c saw. China had the concept of zero hundreds of years before anyone else did . . ._

Astou was pointing at the spreadsheet. "I am so sorry, Sam-Carter. This symbol here – "

"That's a multiplication function."

"Yes, yes, you told me that, I am so stupid! And this is division . . . "

Sam bit off the reflex impulse to tell the girl not to call herself stupid, to reassure her against tearing herself down. Maybe Astou had self-esteem issues, but she wasn't about to bet on it.

"You're catching onto all this very quickly. I thought – Lansana said something about you studying glassblowing."

Astou nodded and held up her hands. It took Sam a moment before the significance clicked in: the girl's hands were calloused from physical work, but most of the callouses were recent. There were patches of rough skin on both palms, several small cuts and nicks on the fingers, and what looked like a healing blister on one thumb. "It is my apprentice year. I am Garanké. All of us must do this, for a full year after our basic studies are finished, before we choose what special thing we will study next. Sometimes longer. We learn to work with the glass, to concentrate and pay attention to our tools, to accept that there is more than numbers and the paths within the mind, more than the question and the thought."

Sam wished, again, that Daniel was here. She'd just have to try and remember it all and tell him later.

"It is our clan heritage. Always, even before Wagadou-Bida stole our distant ancestors, each clan had its mysteries, each clan knew what it did best. The Garanké made fine work with the hands – leatherwork and glasswork, jewelry, all things that were beautiful and useful." There was a slight sing-song to her words, and Sam wondered if it was a rote speech, some kind of catechism. "Today, most of us spend most of our lives doing other things. Some go into other clans, if they have gifts or talents that suit other paths. The best of us, the clan-masters of Garanké, we learn the mysteries of the world around us and master the unknown. We seek to understand all things. It is our belief that this study, this seeking, will be our greatest offering to the people of Ghaba."

Sam felt herself grinning like an idiot. _Scientists. They've got an entire clan of __**scientists.**_

Astou was looking at her hands again, ruefully studying the healing blister. "But first, there is the glass. Perhaps one day we will find the answers to all things. But today and every day, Ghaba must have what it needs today. So, everyone must work with the hands, for at least one round of the seasons. After that, with the mind." She turned to Sam's telescope and peered at the eyepiece.

Sam tore her mind away from a juicy fantasy, in which her fellow doctoral candidates were required to spend a year sweating over a glassblower's furnace to earn the privilege of starting their thesis programs. She could imagine one of them in particular, a pedantic son of privilege from Yale, who'd specialized in holding the floor against all comers during a seminar that should have been a lot more fun and interesting than it had been. He'd've been a lot better for a few blisters.

She started to explain how the system of lenses and mirrors worked, and discovered that Astou already knew the basics. Apparently, Ghaban technology had already worked out the basic telescope – not much better than Galileo, but more than enough to have Astou almost overflowing with excitement at the magnificent leap forward that Sam's telescope represented.

"This is a wonder! After all the lifetimes of watching the sky, to have such a fine thing! So much better, so much more to see! Oh, our grandmothers would have been so pleased. If only they had had these, it would have been so much easier."

"Your grandmothers?" Sam asked. "Is astronomy also for women only?"

Astou frowned. "No, not just for the women – but in the beginning, in the time of the Gwaldé, it had to be women, because they could do the work and the Gwaldé did not notice, as long as they were careful. The tale is told that the Gwaldé pay little attention to women, except for, well, except as women, no more. They do not think women can make plans or be cunning and clever." She looked at Sam. "Is this tale true?"

"Yes, it's true." _Not just the Goa'uld._ "So the women of your clan became astronomers and mathematicians, and it was kept a secret from the Goa'uld?"

Astou's eyes widened. "Oh, no! Such a task could not be given over to a clan. It was too important! The Spider's Daughters were drawn from all the clans. Like the Amadou are now. Except the Amadou only serve for a few years. For the Daughters, in the old days, it was a life's work." The girl shivered. "Sometimes, it could mean death. I am glad I live now, and those days are past."

"Wait a minute." Sam shook her head slightly, as if that might get the girl's words to make sense. "Who were the Spider's Daughters? What's that got to do with astronomy?"

"Everything! From the early days, the sky has been watched. Watched and studied, so that we would know the movements of the stars and see their future courses. For many, many years the Spider's Daughters watched the sky and attended to the stars, for the Times of Prophecy."

"Prophecy?" Sam tried not to sound too incredulous.

"Oh, not really prophecy, of course. We always knew when the stars would align. It is mathematics, so anyone could have had the same knowledge – but most did not." She laughed. "We had to know on each world, so all would know on each world. It was our great task, our duty – not to our own clan alone, but to all our people."

Sam shook her head. "I don't understand. You – that is, your ancestors – your grandmothers – used your skill to predict stellar movements and called it prophecy, is that it? Because you could tell in advance when certain alignments would occur." Astou nodded, smiling happily. "But why?"

"For freedom. To free our people from the Gwaldé, and to keep us all safe afterwards. Safe and hidden." The girl frowned at Sam's face, frustrated at her inability to explain and be understood. "It is what the Spider's Daughters do. What they did. They have always done thus: watched the sky, worked the numbers, discovered when the stars would take their places. Without them, the web would have torn. The worlds would have remained apart."

"Worlds? Ghaba and Djenne?"

Astou looked uncertain for a moment. Sam wasn't sure where the anxiety came from or what it meant, but she recognized it. "Don't worry. It's okay to tell me. _Are_ there other worlds? More than just the two, I mean?" She held her breath without realizing she was doing it.

A nod. "Yes. Oh yes. Anansi spread his web much farther. How could he not? His children needed his help! There is Ghaba, Djenne, and Gogwario. My grandmother's world." Astou lifted a hand to her faced, brushed an eyelid with its unmistakable Asiatic fold. "All the worlds of the Web are woven together. Once, the Spider's Daughters wove that web: it was their voice that told us when the worlds would be joined, when the Sky-Ring would be uncovered. Behind their words, under their decrees, the Garanké stood. We made the glasses that showed the stars in their subtle dance. We worked the numbers that told the future."

- x -

"It was Anansi's will, his trick that he taught us," Fasseke said. His voice was soft, almost intimate, only just reaching Daniel's ears. The Little Hall had outstanding acoustics, but Fasseke's voice somehow damped the resonance of the wood panels. "Gogwario was forbidden, Ghaba was unknown to any beyond ourselves; the door to Djenne must be barred. Let it be opened only at times that our people will expect, and no others."

Daniel was nodding. "So that was how you did it . . . " His hands made digging gestures. "You buried the Stargate – the 'Sky-Ring' – and then unburied it again – " Fasseke nodded. "Just the one on Djenne? Or all three?"

"Sometimes one, sometimes all. Even before the Gwaldé fled Gogwario, even before they abandoned Djenne, Anansi taught his Daughters how to keep us safe. It took our ancestors many years to establish Ghaba." The old man quirked a smile. "It is much harder for the thief to enter your house when it has no door."

"But how did your people know when to uncover the Gate? How did you coordinate it? With the population split across three different worlds – once the Goa'uld were gone, you'd've had to bury and unbury all the Gates at the same time!" He stared at Fasseke. "But you have no way of communicating with each other without the Gates . . . "

The old man smiled faintly, a glimmer of light in shadow.

"But you did have . . . "

"The Spider's Daughters." Fasseke bowed his head a fraction of an inch in confirmation.

"With them, each world in the group understood what the schedule was. They set up the timetable based on star patterns, and made sure the other Daughters on each world knew when the windows would happen." Daniel frowned. He wished, again, fervently, that Sam was here to explain just what that had to imply. How much work would it have required to accurately predict the movements of constellations on three different planets? And to keep the scheme going for generations?

"But these days, you keep the Gates open all the time – well, you did up till tonight – how long ago did that change?"

"In the days of my grandmother's grandfather, Anansi brought us the blessed tidings of the downfall of Wagadou-Bida."

"So – once you knew Sokar wasn't coming back."

Fasseke nodded.

"He made sure the other Goa'uld didn't know about his trinium trove, after all . . . or couldn't get at it if they did."

Another nod.

"And now you know he's alive and making a comeback. But you didn't know the Daughters had decided to cut you off again. Everyone here was caught by surprise."

Fasseke's answer was cut off by an upwelling of noise outside. Daniel realized that he'd been hearing the sounds for several minutes, gradually growing louder and getting closer, without registering what it was. Now recognition snapped into place. Shouts of anger with an undercurrent of fear, a many-voiced animal growl.

_A mob. There's a mob outside._

_~ tbc ~_


End file.
